


Until the Blood Moon

by Piscaria



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Canon Compliant, First Time, M/M, Possible spoilers for season 3
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-13
Updated: 2013-05-21
Packaged: 2017-11-16 06:29:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 9
Words: 37,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Piscaria/pseuds/Piscaria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the alpha pack’s tests throw Derek into a maze of shifting alliances, his only way out is by placing his trust in Stiles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings/Spoilers:** Contains spoilers for season two, and possible spoilers for season three. Canon-typical descriptions of graphic violence. Eventual death of a minor character.
> 
> Thanks to Lola for all of her encouragement, and to Jessica for patiently listening while I rambled on about the plot. And a million thanks to Drew for looking over my plot diagrams, offering suggestions, snarking over my drafts, and generally raising the bar a little bit higher. <3

As a boy, sneaking into Laura’s room had been the height of adventure. It never mattered how Derek tried to mask his scent, by bathing, wrapping himself in his parents' comforter, or once (goaded on by his cousin) spraying on Laura’s perfume. Inevitably, Laura stormed up to him afterwards, manicured fingernails giving way to claws as she caught Derek by the scruff of the neck and slammed him to the floor. Their mom always just sighed as she wiped the blood from Derek’s face, saying he knew perfectly well a werewolf’s territory was sacred, let alone an older sister’s.

That was before Laura had gripped his hand in the guidance counselor’s office to anchor him while the roar of blood in Derek’s ears drowned out the sheriff's voice. Before she’d wrenched open the chamber of his stolen pistol and crushed the wolfsbane bullet inside, her eyes glowing red as she’d snarled at Derek that he was the only pack she had left, that she’d be damned if she was going to lose him, too. Before she’d kissed his cheek at LaGuardia Airport, telling him not to worry so much, she’d only be gone a few weeks. Before she’d stared blindly up at him from the forest floor. Before Derek covered her face with burlap, and wrapped the vendetta spiral around her body, his blood staining the wolfsbane petals scarlet as his hands cracked and blistered around the rope.

Derek had slept in Laura's room when he first came to Beacon Hills looking for her. The one time he’d peeked into his his own childhood room, the sensory memory of rolling with Kate on his old twin mattress had sent him stumbling backwards, retching. Most of the other bedrooms were uninhabitable, either buried beneath the burned and splintered remains of the roof, or exposed to the autumn storms that always rolled into town. For once, Laura’s room had been the safest option. Derek folded a pallet of blankets in the corner where she used to keep her bed, and tried to remember the buttercup yellow she’d painted the walls on her thirteenth birthday, the posters, poems, and photographs she’d layered on top -- her life’s collage, she’d always called it, though now it was nothing but a fine, papery white layer of ash.

Yet even in the waste of her bedroom, Derek had found small traces of Laura’s recent presence. A pair of earrings she’d bought from a street vendor in New York. The fashion magazine she’d planned to read on the plane. The faint, mango spice of the shampoo she’d used since middle school. The clinging reek of the cigarettes she’d started smoking after the fire, as though breathing in smoke every day could somehow bring her closer to the family who’d choked on it. At first, these hints comforted Derek. They meant he was close, that Laura was here in Beacon Hills. He’d fallen asleep those first few nights half expecting to wake to the tread of her combat boot on his throat, her voice growling, “What the hell do you think you’re doing in here?”

She’d never kick his ass again for stepping into her room uninvited. The room didn’t feel like hers at all, now. It smelled like stale ashes, like rotting wood and decay, like the hunters who’d camped out here for months, and (a little bit) like Derek himself. Still, he leaned his head against the wall, inhaling deeply, until the creak of the front door opening snapped him out of his memories.

Sneaking up on a newly-turned beta wasn’t much of a challenge, but Derek still had to stifle a smirk at the way Isaac jumped when Derek landed in a crouch at the bottom of the staircase. A lacrosse stick clattered to the ground, along with the two duffel bags Isaac had been carrying. _Two_ duffel bags. Derek glanced at them, and then at Isaac, lifting an eyebrow.

“Heading out?”

Isaac squirmed, the leather sleeve of his jacket brushing the black graffiti that still marred the peeling front door.

“Yeah,” he said, not meeting Derek’s eyes. “I’m heading to the lacrosse field. I want to practice looking human when I play, like you told me.”

Derek let the silence stretch between them, watching Isaac’s pulse jump in his throat. “Do you normally bring all your worldly possessions to the lacrosse field?” he asked at last.

Sweat beaded the curls along Isaac’s temple, and he bit his lip, glancing from Derek to the road outside, as though calculating how fast he’d have to run to escape him. Derek was just enough of a bastard to let him fret a few more seconds before he spoke again.

“You know there’s an alpha pack in town.”

“I know.”

“It’s not safe to be alone.” Derek didn’t have to remind him they hadn’t heard from Erica and Boyd. Isaac had been checking his cell phone every hour since they’d returned to the house two days ago and found the symbol painted on the door.

“But I won’t be alone!” Isaac protested. “I’ll be with . . . “ He trailed off, realizing his mistake.

“Scott,” Derek finished for him, hearing the growl in his voice.

Isaac swallowed, then nodded, ducking his head.

“Scott is an idiot!” Derek roared, making Isaac flinch away from him. “When the new alphas play their hand, they won’t care why he’s not running with a pack. They’ll just care that he’s alone. An omega. Do you know what happens to omegas?” He’d been pressing steadily forward as he spoke, until Isaac was flush against the wall, eyes wide and bright.

“I know!” Isaac said, lifting his hands. “I know! I just . . .” He swallowed, glancing at the ground. “I thought maybe he’d listen to me.”

The lie was so obvious that Derek didn’t bother pointing it out, just tilted his head and fixed Isaac with a stare. Isaac bit his lip, unconsciously tilting his head back and up, exposing the smooth, lean line of his throat. Derek rested his fingertips over the pulse there, letting his nails lengthen just enough for Isaac to feel the prick of claws.

“You’re running.”

The pulse beneath Derek's fingers jumped, and Isaac inhaled shakily. He nodded, looking down to where the noonday sun cast his shortened shadow over the fine layer of dust and broken glass that powdered the blackened floorboards.

Isaac had been with Derek for months now, had followed him from the Hale house, to the train station, and back again. Derek hadn’t deluded himself into thinking the boy saw him as anything other than a convenience, but the wolf inside him bristled at the defection, longing to catch Isaac by the throat and back him into the confines of the den, to shake him and bleed him until he rolled on his back, exposing his pale belly in submission.

“Fine. Go.”

Derek stepped aside, letting Isaac scurry out the door, gathering the duffels and lacrosse stick as he went. Leaning against the open door frame, Derek glared out at the woods. Near the treeline, a dappled fawn nibbled on a clump of goldenrod until the wind shifted slightly, carrying the mingled scents of man and wolf. The fawn bolted. Derek glanced back at Isaac, who had stopped a few feet from the road, watching him. 

“Derek,” he said quietly. “It’s . . . It’s not you. You helped me out a lot, with my dad, and the whole fugitive thing. I appreciate it. It’s just . . .” He spread his arms, as if to indicate everything from Jackson, to Peter, to the squared-off triskellion on the fading paint of the front door. “There’s a lot going on right now, you know? And this place gives me the creeps. I always feel like we’re being watched here.”

“We are,” Derek said. “But don’t be stupid enough to think they’re not watching Scott, too.” He stepped inside, letting the door fall shut behind him. When he turned, Peter stood at the base of the staircase.

As always, Derek had to clamp down hard on his wolf to keep the growl from rising in his throat. It wasn’t just that Peter reminded him of lying on his back in reflected beams of moonlight, helpless, while a corpse’s claws bore into him, bleeding his vitality away. It wasn’t even that Derek couldn’t look at Peter without also seeing Laura, the bloody, ragged edges of her torso, the startled, frightened look in her eyes. Peter smelled wrong now, not just like death (although the dank, sepulchral odor that had permeated his bones during his burial beneath the floorboards could never be washed away), but like ozone before a storm, like rust, and toadstools, and stagnant water, yet then again like none of these things, because whatever Peter smelled like, it wasn’t natural, wasn't anything Derek could place.

Peter opened his mouth to speak, and Derek cut him off with a glare. “Don’t start,” he said. “They’re not your pack.”

“They don’t look like yours anymore, either.”

Derek took a deep breath, forced his fingers to unclench from the fists they’d formed.

Peter wore a calculating smile. “They’re here, Derek. You know it. They might be watching you even now. And what would they see?”

“A walking corpse and the nephew who’s really sick of listening to him?” Derek said, shoving past Peter.

“An alpha without a pack!” Peter snapped from behind him. “You might as well be an omega.” 

Wood cracked in the wall that used to separate the foyer from the living room as Peter flew through it in a rain of plaster, landing hard on his face. Derek ducked beneath the jagged splinters to stalk after him. He knew his eyes were glowing.

“It’s not like you did any better,” he said, glaring down at Peter. “You couldn’t even get Scott to talk to you! I had three betas! I had a pack!”

Peter smirked as he picked himself up, dusting off his pants. “Exactly,” he said. “You _had_ a pack. Now it’s just you and I, dear nephew.” He brushed close, and rested his hand on Derek’s shoulder, squeezing just hard enough to be painful. “You can’t afford to take any more chances.”

“Whatever you’re trying to say, just say it,” Derek said. “I’m not in the mood to listen to this.”

“Oh, Derek,” Peter said. The sadness in his voice sounded genuine. “You know what your mistake was?”

“Not killing you a second time?”

“You didn’t kill, period!” Peter brushed past Derek and into the kitchen, which was the only room in the house even halfway functional. The cheap beer fridge Derek had attached to the generator still hummed in one corner. Peter bent to open it, and drew out a bottle of pinot grigio.

Derek watched, arms folded, as Peter plucked a gleaming wine glass from the one intact, though blackened, cupboard. The bright scent of the wine bloomed in the air as Peter popped the cork, notes of grass and apricot wafting across the charred kitchen. Derek felt, bizarrely, like he’d stepped into some nightmarish version of his childhood. Peter had always loved wine. He claimed it was wasted on humans, with their weaker senses of taste and smell.

As though thinking the same thing, Peter lifted his glass to Derek in an ironic toast. “Here is the Derek Hale recipe for making a pack,” he said, leaning back against the counter. “Take a group of desperate, lonely teenagers. Toss them all together, season them with fear, cross your fingers, and hope.”

Derek felt his mouth drawing into a scowl. He hadn’t felt anything like hope in years.

Peter swirled the wine in the glass, breathing in deeply. His eyes met Derek’s over the top of the wine glass, and he smirked, taking a long sip. “My dear boy,” he said. “If you’re going to cook up a pack from such pathetic ingredients, you’ve got to remember to bring them to a boil.”

“Dad never had to,” Derek snapped.

Peter only lifted his eyebrows, taking another sip. He didn’t need to say that Derek wasn’t his father. They both knew Derek was thinking it. With the wine glass poised in his hand and the bottle cradled in the crook of one arm, Peter stepped towards the kitchen doorway. As he passed him, he stopped to squeeze his shoulder. This time, it felt almost paternal, and Derek hated him for it.

“They’re watching you, Derek,” Peter said. “Show them what you’ve got this time, hmm?”

* * *

Stiles reached the lacrosse field first, no surprise. Scott had turned down his offer of a ride, saying he wanted to run, get a bit of the wolf out of his system before they practiced. Since Stiles heartily approved of anything that kept Scott’s wolf powers toned down on the field, he hadn’t protested. Instead, he took advantage of being early by tossing his duffel bag onto the hood of his Jeep, then clambering up beside it. He settled cross-legged with a lacrosse stick in his hands, trying to concentrate on his breathing like Deaton had taught him. Inhale. Exhale. Focus the mind.

“I will make first line this year,” he murmured, trying to remember the cheers and the exhilaration from the final game without thinking of the pain and the fear that followed. “I’m a strong player. I will make first line.”

“Yeah. Keep telling yourself that Stilinski.” 

Stiles’s eyes flew open to see Jackson leaning against the Jeep, close enough to touch. He flailed backwards, nearly falling off the hood, while Jackson laughed and laughed like the douche he was. Not for the first time since Jackson had turned into an actual werewolf, and not the mind-controlled, paralytic lizard that was going to be haunting Stiles’s dreams until he died, thank you, Stiles hated Derek a little for giving him the bite in the first place. Jackson had been enough of an asshole before he was a werewolf, even discounting the whole kanima thing. Leaning closer, Jackson loomed over Stiles in a way that might have been threatening, if he didn't routinely get worse from _Derek_. Stiles met his gaze head-on, settling his face into his most deliberately unimpressed expression.

“What are you doing here, Jackson? Shouldn’t you be off learning how not to chase your own tail?”

Jackson looked pointedly at the lacrosse stick in Stiles’s hands. “The same thing as you, moron. Keeping in practice.” His smirk widened, “Of course, some of us need it more than others. It’s going to take actual magic if you want to make first line.” He sneered down at Stiles’s cross-legged posture, and shook his head. “Especially if that’s your idea of practicing.”

“Look,” Stiles said, straightening. “I was waiting for —“

Jackson — and there was no better term for it — pricked to attention like a dog, turning suddenly away from Stiles, nostrils flaring. Stiles followed his gaze to see Scott emerging from the forest . . . with Isaac following behind him.

As if this afternoon couldn't get any worse. Squirming off the hood of the Jeep, Stiles started across the field to meet them. Isaac waved at Stiles, a little hesitantly. But his tentative smile disappeared when he caught sight of Jackson. The two of them glared at each other, the tension between them suddenly thick enough to touch. Stiles half expected them to start barking at each other. Ignoring both of them, Stiles sidled up to Scott.

“What is _he_ doing here?”

Stiles hissed. He tried to keep his voice quiet, but knew Isaac could probably hear him anyway. Too bad.

Scott shrugged, smiling just a little guiltily. “He’s spending the night at my place. I couldn’t just leave him there alone. You don’t mind, do you?”

Stiles opened his mouth, then closed it again. “No,” he said. “No. It’s not like we were —“ What, he wondered? Hanging out? Having special, best-friend time? He never thought he’d have to explain that Saturday mornings at the lacrosse field were supposed to be sacred. No wolf powers, no mooning over Allison, and definitely no members of Derek’s pack. This was Stiles’s time to pretend, if only for an hour, that his life wasn’t turning into a horror movie.

“Great!” Scott beamed, patting his shoulder. Then he frowned, looking up at Jackson as if he’d just noticed him. He and Isaac were actually circling each other now. “What the hell, Stiles? You brought _Jackson_?”

“No!” Stiles made a face at the very idea of hanging out with Jackson willingly. “He just turned up. What is it with those two, anyway?” Stiles jerked his head towards Jackson and Isaac, who were now growling low in their throats, not entirely wolfed out, but pretty damned close to it

“It’s a dominance thing,” Scott said, adjusting the duffel strap over his shoulder, then starting towards them, apparently unconcerned.

“What?” Stiles asked, trotting after him.

Scott shrugged. “Think about it. Derek turned both of them. They’re kind of in the same pack, even if they don’t want to be. With Boyd and Erica missing, they’re both fighting to be second in command.”

“And where do you fit into all of this?”

Scott’s grin was way too smug for his face. “I’m not part of Derek’s pack.”

He stepped between Isaac and Jackson. The movement might have looked casual to them, but Stiles knew Scott well enough to see the alertness in his spine, the hands held carefully away from his body, so he could flick out his claws without gouging his jeans. Scott was ready for a fight.

“Whoah,whoah, whoah!” Stiles said, holding up his palms. “Guys! I think I’ve had my share of supernatural battles for the week.”

Scott glanced sidelong at Stiles, then jerked his chin down. “He’s right,” he growled. “If you two want to fight, do it on the field.”

“Fine,” Isaac snarled. “Two on two.”

“Done,” Jackson said, and then startled Stiles by crossing to stand beside him, throwing an arm around his shoulders. “I’ll take Stilinski.”

Stiles gaped. Scott and Isaac frowned, staring at Jackson in confusion. When Jackson smiled, he showed far too many teeth.

“I’m good enough to take a handicap,” he said, and hefted his lacrosse stick.

Stiles wondered just how hard he’d have to lob a ball at him to split his werewolf skull in half. Scott glanced hesitantly between Stiles and Isaac, biting his teeth.

“It’s fine,” Stiles sighed. “Isaac and Jackson shouldn’t be on the same team, anyway.”

Scott relaxed, giving Stiles a grateful smile. Isaac still mostly looked like he wanted to rip Jackson’s throat out, and Stiles found himself warming to the guy.

Of course, that only lasted until he and Isaac were facing off, their sticks held flat on the ground and Isaac’s eyes glowing amber through the metal bars of his facemark. Stiles glared right back, refusing to be intimidated.

“Go!” Scott yelled, since none of them had thought to bring a whistle.

Isaac growled, clamping down on the ball with the back of his stick and trying to roll it towards him. He was faster than Stiles, with better reflexes, and it should have worked. But Stiles had spent half an hour last night visualizing a situation just like this, and a strong sense of certainty rose up in his stomach. He brought the head of his stick down on top of the ball, shoving Isaac’s stick aside. Scooping the ball from the grass, Stiles launched it vaguely in Jackson’s direction, trusting his werewolf speed to make up for shitty aim. Sure enough, Jackson leaped to catch it, even as Scott barreled towards him.

Scott could probably take Jackson in a fight, Stiles thought. He’d been a werewolf longer, and had a better sense of his abilities. But Jackson had been a better lacrosse player than Scott when they were both human, and now that claws and fangs had leveled the playing field between them, he was better again. He easily avoided Scott’s poke check, and spun into dodge around him, his stick flying from right hand to left in a blur of movement. His eyes met Stiles across the field, and Stiles gave a little “come on” jerk with his chin. For a second, he thought Jackson was going to ignore him and insist on scoring himself. Apparently Isaac thought so, too, because he abandoned his guard over Stiles and raced across the field towards Jackson, evidently intent on helping Scott. Then Jackson squared off, passing the ball to Stiles.

The impact of it landing in the pocket shook through him, and he hesitated for a split second, before his brain reminded him that he was playing with werewolves, and was about three seconds away from getting smeared on the grass. In one smooth motion, Stiles shot the ball towards the goal and _wished._ It landed squarely in the net, and he whooped, raising his stick above his head, triumphant.

Jackson was on him in a second, slapping Stiles’s shoulder hard enough to send him staggering forward. “Tied, bitches!” he crowed, baring his teeth at Scott and Isaac. At the moment, Stiles was so overjoyed that he didn’t even care that Jackson was being a dick.

Isaac growled low in his throat, and opened his mouth to respond. Then he froze, jaw dropping, and cocked his head to one side, eyes suddenly glowing in the afternoon light.

Whatever it was, Scott and Jackson felt it too. Jackson’s face had completely wolfed out, his head tilted back, as though listening to something. Scott hadn’t shifted, but he’d dropped into a crouch, all of his muscles poised for action.

“What is it?” Stiles asked, the hair on the back of his neck rising, though he wasn’t entirely sure why.

“Shhh,” Scott hissed. “It’s a howl. Listen.”

Stiles listened, hard, but all he could hear was the faint drone of traffic on the highway, a few birds chirping in the sunlight. “Who was it?” Stiles asked, inching closer to Scott.

Scott shook his head, frowning, his shoulders lifting in a shrug.

Isaac answered, his voice tight and pained. "It's Erica."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lolafeist and Zoemathemata for their input on this chapter, and thanks always to Drew for his quick beta work.

An icy chill touched Derek’s spine as Erica’s howl echoed into silence. He’d been reading in Laura’s old room, curled awkwardly in one of the canvas camp chairs that had served them at the train station. But at the sound, Derek snapped the book shut and vaulted through the window, dropping easily to the ground just as a second, deeper howl followed the first. Boyd. 

Like Erica’s, Boyd’s howl shuddered with pain, his voice raw and edged with desperation. They were howling for pack, for their alpha, and everything in Derek yearned to respond, for all that they’d walked away. The bonds between an alpha and a bitten beta could never be entirely severed. Derek took a hesitant step towards the forest, even as the front door opened behind him.

Peter stepped out, still carrying the wine glass. He leaned against the door frame and tilted his head to one side, listening to Boyd’s howl fade with the calm appreciation of a symphony goer.

“Well,” he said, when silence fell uneasily over the forest. “It sounds like they met another pack after all.” Peter sipped his wine, watching Derek.

“They’re hurt,” Derek said.

Peter nodded. Took another sip. “You know it’s a trap.”

Turning away from Peter, Derek looked out into the trees. The forest looked as serene as ever, but he could still feel the disturbance of their howls on the air. It felt expectant and unfinished, the calm before a storm.

“They left you, Derek,” Peter said. “You don’t owe them anything.”

“No,” Derek murmured, remembering Erica’s calves beneath his palms in the hospital morgue, Boyd’s heartbeat stuttering in surprise when Derek, Isaac, and Erica crowded into the empty space around him on the bleachers. Decision made, he looked over his shoulder at Peter. “If you’re going to help me, help,” he said. “I don’t need your advice.”

Throwing back his head, Derek let out his own howl, his fangs lengthening around it. _I’m coming,_ it said, although bitten wolves like Erica and Boyd might not be able to read it. Dropping to all fours, Derek bounded into the forest.

Peter didn’t follow, but Derek hadn’t expected him to.

Trees flashed by him as he ran, rabbits and squirrels hurrying out of his path. Derek listened intently, but Boyd and Erica didn’t howl again. His stomach knotted, and he forced himself to move faster, trying to pinpoint the location the sound had come from. He wished they would howl again, but they didn’t, and it worried him. As he drew nearer to the edges of Hale property, the sickening scent of panic and pain began to bleed through the cedar and loam. Derek followed it. Soon he could pick out other notes beneath it, the tang of blood, the faded pack scent of Boyd and Erica, and something predatory and lightning sharp that made Derek’s hackles rise.

Movement in the trees alerted Derek to the guard's presence a second before he caught sight of the teenage boy who stood half-hidden behind a grove of cedars. He looked human, even smelled it in this form, but the power in his stance and the flare of his nostrils as he scented the air revealed him for a werewolf. Derek rolled out of sight before the boy could spot him, grateful for being on his own territory. His scent was so strong here that it would be virtually impossible for another werewolf to pick up on his presence by smell alone.

Not wanting to bother with a fight when Erica and Boyd were in danger, Derek crept past the guard, knowing he was on the right track now. A second later he found them, near the gravel parking area at the head of one of the trails cutting through the nature conservancy. Derek dropped to all fours, watching through the cover of the trees as a slender woman in her late twenties crouched to poke at a figure on the ground. It took Derek a second to realize it was Erica. Blood clotted so thickly in her hair that Derek could hardly see the traces of blonde beneath the matted gore. Boyd lay on the ground beside her, his skin gone nearly gray. His jeans were caked with dried blood, and his legs lay in an odd angle, as though they’d been broken in several places. Blood seeped from a set of fresh claw marks running across his abdomen — claw marks that weren’t beginning to heal, even as the seconds passed. A few feet away, another teenage boy lounged against a tree trunk. He looked vaguely familiar, and it took Derek a second to realize why — he was the spitting image of the guard Derek had passed in the woods.

His claws flicked out by instinct as Derek stepped into the clearing, and he cracked his neck, letting the wolf fully rise into his features. The female alpha crouched between Erica and Boyd lifted her head to reveal eyes a shade brighter than her close-cropped, scarlet hair. She bared her teeth at Derek in a parody of a smile. He growled low in his throat.

Still slumped beside the alpha’s boot, Erica let out a low whine. “Derek,” she moaned. “We’re sorry.”

Derek ignored her, as did the other alpha.

Never taking her eyes off Derek, she rose gracefully to her feet. “Derek Hale,” she said, in a low and throaty voice. “I’m glad to finally meet you in person. My name is Rachel Reynolds. I’m sure you know of my pack.”

She offered her hand to Derek. Her nails were human, a peace offering, he knew from his father’s dimly remembered lessons. He ignored the hand.

“This is my territory.”

“And we were returning something to you,” she said shortly. She kicked Boyd, hard. He whimpered, but didn’t flinch away. Derek wondered if he was even conscious. Beside him, Erica cowered, whining low in her throat.

“We found these omegas wandering alone,” Rachel said, a tone of mock sadness in her voice. “My packmates and I were planning to . . . deal with them.” Fangs flashed beneath her scarlet lips. “But they say they belong to you.”

Erica rolled her face up to look at him pleadingly, her eyes wide and frightened. “Derek, please,” she begged. “We’re sorry. We should have listened to you.”

Derek glared at her to shut up.

“So how about it?" Rachel asked, flicking her claws out. "Shall I take care of these pests for you?”

She planted her boot on Boyd's chest, but he didn't stir. If not for the steady pulse of blood rising from the wounds in his stomach, Derek would have thought he was dead. Erica was trembling, panic rising in an acrid cloud around her. Her wild-eyed gaze caught Derek's, and she mouthed something. It might have been "help," or maybe, "please." Derek lifted his chin.

“Back off,” he growled, advancing towards Rachel. “They’re mine.”

Rachel laughed, a cold, humorless sound. “Excellent,” she said. “We were hoping you’d say that. Weren’t we, Ethan?”

The boy stepped away from the tree, his brown eyes flaring red. “Yes,” he agreed. “We really were.”

“We’ve been watching you,” Rachel said, stalking towards Derek. “We were so curious to see how you’d handle your new rank.” As she spoke, Ethan fell into step beside her. A second later, his twin materialized from the trees, taking up position on her other side.

“The benefits are good,” Derek said. “But I can’t say much for my colleagues.”

The twins looked at each other. Rachel let out a low chuckle. “You’re brave,” she said. “Brave, but stupid.”

“Yeah,” Ethan said. “Tracking us down without your pack? Not the smartest move.”

“That’s if he even has a pack,” his twin said. “Word on the street is that this one has trouble keeping hold of his betas.”

“How about I take ahold of you?” Derek said, dropping into a defensive crouch.

The boy opened his mouth to respond, but fell silent, his pointed ears flicking towards the distance. A fraction of a second later, Derek heard it, too — the low whine of a car engine growing steadily closer. In a moment, a pair of headlights rounded the corner as the car sped towards them. It turned into the parking lot at the trail head, its headlights almost blinding. The three alphas turned as one to stare as Stiles’s Jeep skidded to a stop before them, throwing up a shower of gravel.

Derek’s heart pounded in his chest. He glared at the Jeep, silently willing Stiles to get out of here. It figured that Stiles would show up at the worst possible moment. For a single alpha to take on three others without the strength of a pack was nearly impossible. To do so while protecting a human . . . Derek’s hands fisted, and he sized up the three alphas. If he attacked now, while they were distracted, he might be able to hold them off long enough for Stiles to escape. Derek took a deep breath, tensing his muscles to leap.

The driver’s door opened, and Stiles stepped out, glancing from Derek to the three alphas and then to Boyd and Erica’s prone forms. “Well,” he said, shuffling his feet. “This is interesting.”

A second later, Scott, Jackson and Isaac piled out of the Jeep behind him, and Derek realized that he might actually get out of this alive.

Ethan’s twin lifted his hands away from his sides, claws out, ready to spring. “It looks like I was wrong,” he said to Derek. “You do have a pack.”

Scott drew himself up with indignation, and Derek winced, knowing what was coming.

But Jackson beat Scott to it. “We’re not —“ he started, then fell silent as Stiles slapped a hand over his mouth, seemingly unbothered by the fangs beneath.

“We’re not looking for a fight,” he said, glaring at Jackson, then at Scott before daring to lower his hand. Derek never thought he’d be grateful for Stiles to start talking, but the iron band that had locked around his chest when the Jeep pulled into the parking lot was starting to ease. Obnoxious as he was, Stiles was perceptive, Derek had to give him that. 

Fortunately, Isaac, too, seemed to realize the predicament they were in. He circled the three alphas warily, moving closer to Derek. “We have you outnumbered,” he said. “You should get out of here.”

Scott was looking between Isaac and Stiles with a troubled look on his face. But his trust in his friends seemed to outweigh his own misgivings. “We don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

Rachel smirked. “As if you could.”

Her voice sounded confident as before, but her posture had become more guarded. She’d expected Derek to come alone, he realized, wondering just how long her pack had been watching him. She hadn’t planned on a real fight. The twins looked to her for direction, and she frowned, apparently trying to make up her mind.

Then Peter melted out of the trees. He wore a smile, but it didn’t meet his eyes -- they were dead and flat, as they’d been the whole time he was in his coma. “Rachel,” he said, nodding in greeting.

For a second, she smelled of fear. She drew closer to the twins, lifting her claws up before her. “Peter,” she said. “How nice to see you. I’d heard you’d been resurrected.”

“Rumor does travel quickly, doesn’t it?” Peter said. “For instance, we heard that you’d come prowling onto Hale lands now that a new alpha is here. I noticed you never dropped by when my brother was still alive. Back then we could have offered you better . . . hospitality.”

“Things change,” Rachel said tightly.

Peter laughed without humor. “They do indeed.” He stepped up to stand beside Derek, resting a hand on his shoulder. “Fortunately, some do remain the same. I was talking to the Quiniard pack up in Oregon just a few minutes ago.”

Rachel growled low in her throat.

Peter smiled pleasantly. “Yes,” he said. “Terri extended a greeting to you as well. We’re both traditionalists, Terri and I. We believe in following the proper . . . protocols.”

“We announced our intentions!” Ethan growled.

“Yes,” Peter said. “An excellent choice, by the way. The front door needed a bit of sprucing up. So since you’ve declared your challenge so politely, we, in turn, are entitled to request a prorogation period, given the recent upheaval our pack has faced. I believe a season is traditional, don’t you?” He held Rachel’s gaze, still smiling, closed-mouthed, but predatory.

Finally, she gave a sharp nod. “Fine. You have until the Blood Moon.”

“Agreed,” Peter said.

“Come on,” Rachel snapped, and the twin Alphas fell into step beside her. As they passed Derek, she glared at him. “Maybe by then,” she said sharply, “the alpha of the group will be up for doing his own negotiations.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter three is finished, and will be up once I get a chance to edit it. Until then, I always welcome feedback and constructive criticism. Thank you for reading!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lola, Jessica, and (of course!) Drew for their help with this chapter.

“When did my Jeep turn into a werewolf ambulance?” Stiles asked as he pushed up the front seat so Boyd and Erica could fit in the back. Predictably, nobody answered him. Stiles stepped back and watched as Isaac and Derek carefully eased the two, half-conscious werewolves into the Jeep. He felt a little sorry for them, honestly — from all of Scott and Isaac's bitching on the drive to the nature conservancy, he got the idea that the backseat really wasn’t comfortable for two people, let alone two severely injured ones. At least Boyd and Erica were barely conscious. They probably wouldn’t even remember getting manhandled (wolfhandled?) into the Jeep, then smushed together in the narrow back seat. Probably.

Derek slid into the passenger seat, effectively ending the heated argument between Scott, Isaac, and Jackson about who got a ride back to town. Resigning himself to yet another night of hauling around injured werewolves, Stiles got behind the wheel and pulled out of the parking lot, only half listening to Derek’s side of a terse phone conversation with Dr. Deaton.

Because Derek was Derek, he didn’t bother to end his phone call with anything like “goodbye.” Instead, he just snapped, “Fine,” into the phone, and ended the call. He sat almost preternaturally still, glaring out the window.

Stiles cleared his throat. “Just so we’re clear,” he said, “if anyone brings up any sort of amputation, I am done.”

The glare Derek leveled at him in response was a thing of beauty. Heart stopping, panic inspiring beauty, like standing at the edge of a cliff or the eye of a hurricane. Stiles swallowed, reflexively shrinking away from it, but holding Derek's gaze nonetheless. Trying not to look intimidated, Stiles focused instead on the line furrowed between Derek's eyes, the worried set of his frown, and _holy shit_ , when had Stiles learned to tell Derek’s bitch faces apart?

“Hey,” he said, gentling his voice. “They’re going to be okay.”

In response, Derek just stared at him pointedly, his expression somewhere between _are you serious?_ and _when did you become a doctor?_

Stiles exhaled slowly, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah, I get it. They’re hurt. But they brought it on themselves, right? I mean, they left you. That’s what Isaac said.”

 _Good one, Stiles,_ he thought, watching Derek’s frown deepen even further. _Remind him that the only person jumping to be part of his pack is his undead uncle._

“Stiles,” Derek said in his patient voice. It was almost creepier than his pissed-off voice, which Stiles didn’t think was entirely fair. His large hand dropped onto Stiles’s shoulder, and Stiles bit his lip as he felt the pinprick of claw tips resting on his clavicle and the very base of his throat. He didn’t think Derek would hurt him. In fact, he was almost 90% sure of it. But that remaining 10%, along with the instinctive part of his brain that _knew_ Derek was a predator, made Stiles’s heartbeat falter, then race inside his chest.

“Okay,” he breathed. “Shutting up now.” The claws withdrew, but Derek’s hand was a steady, warm weight on his shoulder until they’d nearly reached the animal clinic.

Once they’d settled Erica and Boyd onto the folding metal cots in the examination room, Derek straightened, his gray Henley stained with blood from carrying Erica and Boyd.

“Go home, Stiles.”

Stiles nodded. “Yeah, alright.”

Dr. Deaton gave Stiles an absent-minded nod when he opened the door, his attention fixed on the two, bleeding werewolves in front of him. Derek unfolded a metal chair and sagged into it. He rested his head on his hands, eyes falling shut, and for just a second, Stiles glimpsed the worry and exhaustion he must have been hiding on the drive to the clinic.

Swallowing hard, Stiles let the door fall shut on Derek’s pained expression and the curve of Deaton’s shoulders as he worked over Erica and Boyd’s prone figures. Stiles dug his keys from his pocket, and opened the door of the Jeep. Then he staggered backwards, grimacing. Blood pooled on the rubber floormats, and was already drying rust-brown on the upholstery. It looked like he’d transported a body back there. Hell, it looked like he’d killed it there. How did you even clean that much blood? Scott’s mom would probably know, Stiles thought, since she worked in a hospital. But that made him think of his dad, and yeah, there was no way he could let his dad see this. Stiles already suspected his dad was starting to think he was a criminal, the way he kept turning up at crime scenes. Stiles frowned, wondering if they had a tarp he could throw in the back until he got it cleaned up.

He covered his mouth with the sleeve of his hoodie to mask the smell of drying blood, and cautiously eased himself into the Jeep. How on earth did werewolves manage to get anything done with their enhanced sense of smell? Scott must want to puke every time he passed a dumpster. Stiles’s human nose was enough, thank you. Stupid werewolves and their stupid, violent problems. Stiles’s life had been so much simpler before Scott got bit.

Trying to forget the way Boyd had moaned when Derek lifted him up in a fireman’s carry, Stiles eased the Jeep out of the parking lot. Erica had been out cold by then. She hadn’t even whimpered when Stiles rolled her out of the Jeep and into Derek’s arms. Five days ago, Stiles had seen them shuddering with electricity in the Argent’s basement, while Gerard beat the shit out of him. His bruises had mostly faded, but side still ached. Gerard only had Stiles for a few hours, and he still had nightmares about it. But days of that? Then another five getting tortured by werewolves?

Pulling to a stop at a red light, Stiles drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, thinking again of Derek’s face in the clinic, of his hand on Stiles’s shoulder on the way there. He wondered if Derek had worn that same, defeated expression the night Scott almost died.

“Goddamnit,” Stiles muttered, and abruptly flipped on the turn signal. He hated werewolves. He really, really did.

Derek’s head snapped up in surprise when Stiles pushed back into the clinic, carrying a black coffee from the corner stand and a blue-raspberry flavored Red Bull topped with whipped cream and sprinkles.

“Here,” he muttered, shoving the coffee at Derek.

Derek stared at the cup for a long moment before he took it, his fingers brushing against Stiles’s on the cardboard sleeve. He lifted the cup to his nose and inhaled deeply, his eyelashes fluttering against his cheek for a second. The muscles in Derek’s throat rippled as he took a cautious sip, and Stiles looked away, pulling another folding chair from the corner to sit beside Derek’s.

“Thanks,” Derek finally said, after the silence had stretched out between them and gotten comfortable. He didn’t look at Stiles.

Stiles shrugged, losing another game in Temple Run as his explorer barreled into a tree trunk. “Sure,” he said. “No problem.”

* * *

The rich aroma of Derek’s coffee drowned the mingled scents of blood, pain, and disinfectant permeating the clinic. Derek sipped it slowly, carefully not poking at the knot that had formed in his stomach when Stiles handed him the paper cup. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone but Laura had shown him such a simple act of kindness.

Beside him, Stiles was surprisingly quiet, playing some kind of game on his phone. He’d been practically vibrating with coiled energy on the drive to the animal clinic. Derek had assumed things would only get worse when Stiles had started slurping at his energy drink (and really, how could he stand to drink those? Even with human senses, Derek could probably smell the chemicals wafting off it.) Yet oddly, the caffeine seemed to settle Stiles down. He fidgeted, yes, but it was quiet fidgeting, not the manic energy Derek had seen from him before. Stiles drew his knees up to his chest, clasping his hands around him. He dropped his feet to the floor, stretching his long legs out before him and flexing his toes in their faded Converse. He sprawled across the chair, knocking his knee into Derek’s, then wilted a little under Derek’s glare, withdrawing back to his own space. Derek pressed his lips together to keep them from twitching. He wouldn’t have admitted it under torture, but part of him liked having Stiles there. It was a relief to focus on him, and not on whatever Deaton was doing to Erica and Boyd.

For his part, Stiles seemed to be pretending that a complicated medical procedure wasn’t taking place in front of him. He looked at his phone, or at Derek when he thought he wasn’t watching. Occasionally, his eyes skittered over the metal cots as if he couldn’t help himself, and then he pulled a face so exaggerated that Derek wondered how the muscles in his cheeks and jaw even moved that way.

Stiles started to yawn after a few hours. Eventually, he slumped down in his chair and closed his eyes -- “Jus’ for a second,” he murmured. His breath lengthened into sleep a few minutes later. When he tipped sideways in the chair, snuggling his face into Derek’s shoulder and curling his fingers around Derek’s bicep, Derek didn’t bother to move him. He watched Deaton work on Erica and Boyd, and resisted the urge to wrap an arm around Stiles’s shoulders and hitch him closer, to bury his nose in Stiles’s hair and breathe in the sleep-rich scent rising off his body. It was instinct, he thought, remembering the Wolf Moon celebrations of his childhood, when they’d cleared the furniture from the sitting room and the whole pack, from his laughing, white haired grandmother to his tiny human cousins, had burrowed in together on mattresses and sleeping bags spread over the hardwood floor. No one but pack had ever trusted Derek enough to sleep beside him. _And they shouldn’t have trusted me,_ he thought, heart heavy with regret. A bone snapped in Boyd’s leg as Deaton readjusted it, and Derek shifted in his seat, drawing closer to Stiles without meaning to.

“Yeah, thas’ nice,” Stiles mumbled against Derek’s shoulder, his feet moving restlessly on the floor, his fingers clasping, then releasing, the sleeve of Derek’s leather jacket. He rubbed his face against Derek’s arm, like a wolf laying down his scent. A few minutes later, he blinked awake, scrubbing his eyes blearily and making a low, sleepy sound in his throat. Derek could tell the exact moment Stiles realized who he was cuddling. An expression of pure horror crossed his face, and he snapped away from Derek like a rubber band, blood flushing his cheeks and neck.

“Okay,” Stiles breathed, clasping his hands around the back of his neck. “That was awkward.”

Derek ignored him, resettling his weight in his own chair and ignoring the chill against his side where Stiles's warm body had pressed. 

Not long after that, Deaton wiped his hands on his towel and sighed, weariness in his expression. “I’ve done everything I can,” he said. “The rest is up to Stiles.”

Derek frowned, but Stiles just nodded absently, his thumbs flying over the keyboard on his phone. Then Deaton’s words seemed to catch up with him, and he stiffened, nearly tipping the chair over.

“Wait. What?” he sputtered.

Deaton smiled. “Physically, they should be fine,” he said. “But half of all healing takes place in the mind. They’ve withdrawn inside themselves because of the pain. We need to call them back, convince them that it’s safe to be well again.”

Stiles swallowed audibly, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Wow,” he said. “That sounds . . . it’s a little too life and death for me. I’m better with little things, you know? Give me some more mountain ash, I can handle that. I’m a low-pressure kind of guy.”

Derek’s eyebrows lifted towards his hairline despite himself as he listened to Stiles ramble. He’d seen Stiles in life or death situations, preparing to cut Derek’s arm off after the wolfsbane bullet, holding him up in the pool, crashing into the kanima with his Jeep. Stiles whined about them. He dragged his feet. But when the shit hit the fan, Stiles could handle himself. That was something Derek couldn’t say about most humans, or even half of the werewolves he knew. How could Stiles not know that?

“Can’t you do it?” Stiles was saying now, looking up at Deaton with pleading eyes.

“I could,” Deaton said. “But they know you. That will make it easier.”

“They know Derek,” Stiles said, brightening. “You’ll do it, won’t you Derek?”

He turned his wide eyes on Derek, who shrugged uncomfortably. His mom had always been the healer of their Pack. Derek knew the basic tricks -- how to take away pain, or use it to trigger the healing process -- but he wasn’t particularly good at them. After the trick Lydia had pulled to bring Peter back to life, Derek felt wary of magic in general. He figured it was justified.

Fortunately, Deaton was shaking his head. “Derek is a predator,” he said. “And they’re still newly turned. They might remember he’s their alpha and trust him enough follow him back. Or they might just sense that he’s more powerful than they are, and retreat even further. There’s a fifty-fifty chance.”

Stiles worried at his lower lip, looked at Erica and Boyd. “Alright,” he said. “What do I have to do?”

* * *

Stiles felt a little ridiculous standing between the two cots with a piece of polished moonstone in each hand. It didn’t help that Derek still sat against the side wall, watching Stiles like he was some kind of zoo exhibit. Even when Stiles closed his eyes, he could feel Derek’s gaze on him, focused and intent. Taking a deep breath, Stiles released it slowly, trying to calm down. His foot jiggled against the floor, and he swallowed, opening his eyes again.

“Can you just not watch?” he asked Derek, though not with any real hope.

Derek stretched his legs out in front of him, crossing his arms behind his head.

“Oh, fuck you!” Stiles said. “I don’t sit there and judge you while you’re doing your werewolf thing.”

“Yeah you do,” Derek said, and okay, fair point. But Derek pointedly shifted his gaze from Stiles to one of the anatomy posters lining the back wall, so Stiles figured he'd won anyway.

“Okay,” he muttered, trying to center himself. Breathe in. Breathe out. Focus. Ignore Derek.

“Are you ready?” Deaton asked.

 _No,_ Stiles thought. But he didn’t think he’d ever feel any readier, so he only shrugged.

Deaton nodded. “Go ahead and start.”

Stiles caught Boyd’s hand, then Erica’s, bridging the space between their cots. Their palms burned against his, fever hot, but the moonstones were cool. The back of his neck tingled, and Stiles cracked open one eye to see that, yep, Derek was watching him again. Asshole. Trying to ignore him, Stiles focused on Erica and Boyd instead, on the heat of their hands in his and the shallow breath lifting their chests.

“Remind them who they are,” Deaton said quietly from behind them. “You have to believe that they can hear your thoughts.”

“Right,” Stiles said. “Okay.” He glanced from Boyd to Erica, then closed his eyes, trying to drown out everything but them.

He tried to look back on his memories of them. Erica was easiest. He knew her better. He remembered Erica shaking on the floor of their geometry class last year, caught in the grip of a seizure. Erica, tumbling from the climbing wall into Scott’s arms. Erica, holding the entire cafeteria’s attention as she bit into a red apple, slipping into the passenger seat of Derek’s Camaro. Erica slamming Stiles against a wall, throwing the battery of his Jeep at him, confessing she used to have a crush on Stiles. He remembered Erica’s hair tickling his neck as he held her in the boxcar.

Erica’s hand spasmed around his. Somewhere in his mind, he felt the flickering wings of her consciousness spreading out, gaining strength. Relieved, Stiles turned his attention to Boyd. Boyd, who’d sat alone in the cafeteria since he moved here in middle school. Boyd, dangling the keys to the ice rink in front of Stiles’s face. Boyd holding the door open for Erica as Derek dropped them off at school. Boyd standing beside Derek, watchful and calm.

But Boyd’s hand remained limp in Stiles’s grip, and he realized, all at once, that he didn’t know Boyd as well as he knew Erica. Did anyone really know Boyd? Panic flickered through his veins, flaring in the moonstone. In response, an answering consciousness rose up to meet it, and all at once, Stiles _remembered._

The scent of Boyd’s cologne as they sat together on the bleachers at a lacrosse game, the heat of his body pouring out through his jeans and sweater. The timbre of Boyd’s laugh as he sprawled out on the floor of the train station, watching an indie comedy that no one else could make it through. The bright flash of his teeth as he grinned up at his tiny sister, tossing her into the air and beaming back at Erica and Isaac proudly. The pain in his voice as he fought against the electric bonds in the Argent’s basement. The strong press of Boyd’s fingers as they gripped hands, while the alpha pack circled around.

Even the painful memories were honey-sweet, tinted rose with love. Stiles struggled to fight his way free of them, tried to remember which were Erica’s and which were his. Boyd’s hand was gripping his tightly now, almost painfully. When Stiles forced his eyes open, he saw that Boyd was looking, not at Stiles, but at Erica on the opposite bed. She was staring at him just as fiercely, tears gathering in her eyes.

Stiles swallowed, releasing their hands. The moonstone spheres tumbled to the floor, rolling in separate directions. Stiles stumbled backwards, would have fallen if Derek hadn’t suddenly appeared behind him, gripping his arms to keep him upright. Derek half-helped, half-shoved Stiles into a chair, then stepped back to the beds to crouch beside his betas. They leaned into him, reaching to brush their fingers along his arms and shoulders as if they couldn’t help themselves. Stiles couldn’t make out their words, but Erica’s voice was hesitant, apologetic, and Boyd's was even quieter than usual. For his part, Derek sounded gentler than Stiles would have imagined he could be.

A hand landed on his shoulder, and Deaton smiled down at him. “You did well, Stiles.”

Tears prickled in Stiles’s eyes, although he had no idea why. “Thanks,” he said gruffly.

Deaton reached for his hand, pressed something into it. Looking down, Stiles saw one of the moonstone spheres. Deaton gave him an enigmatic smile. “A souvenir,” he said.

Stiles nodded, jerked his head towards the door. “Thanks,” he said. “I’m just going to . . .”

“Of course,” Deaton said, sounding about as exhausted as Stiles felt. “You’ve done more than enough tonight.”

When Stiles stepped outside, the sky was still touched with the faint light of an early summer night. Stiles blinked, shaking his head to orient himself. He felt like he’d been in the clinic all night. He’d half expected to find the sun rising. But his phone said it was only ten o’clock. Stiles let himself into the Jeep, and just sat for a moment, resting his head against the steering wheel. He couldn’t explain the bone-deep weariness weighing his limbs. Was it because of the magic?

Fumbling with his keys, Stiles switched on the ignition, then clasped his hand over his mouth to keep from screaming when red, glowing eyes stared at him through the driver’s side window.

“Holy shit,” he gasped, cracking open the door and glaring out at Derek. “You have to warn a guy!”

Derek just leveled a steady gaze on him. “Move.”

When Stiles just blinked up at him, confused, Derek caught his arm and practically lifted him out of the driver’s seat.

“What are you doing?” Stiles protested.

“You’re not driving,” Derek said, settling behind the wheel himself. “You look ready to pass out.”

Stiles stumbled around the Jeep and collapsed into the passenger seat, still confused. “But what about Erica and Boyd?”

“They’re not going anywhere.”

Stiles leaned back against the headrest, watching Derek covertly through half-lidded eyes. “You’re not quite as much of an asshole as you pretend to be,” he decided, waving a hand vaguely in Derek’s direction.

Derek huffed out a breath that might have been laughter, might have been annoyance. “Shut up, Stiles.”

**To be continued . . .**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter four should be out early next week. Until then, I always appreciate feedback, including constructive criticism. Thanks for reading!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Zoemathemata for cheerleading this chapter, and Drew for the beta work.

When the Camaro pulled up to the animal clinic the next morning, Boyd and Erica were already waiting outside. Boyd sagged against the wall, his jeans riding lower on his hips than usual, and his t-shirt hanging loosely on his usually sturdy frame. Erica leaned back against him, her face pale and exhausted with no make-up to brighten her skin or cover the dark circle beneath her eyes. Without the arsenal of styling creams, hairsprays, and curling irons she’d collected when Derek took her to the mall for her post-bite makeover, the pale wisps of her hair frizzed like a cloud around Boyd’s cheek, where it rested atop her head.

To a wolf’s hearing, the click of the Camaro’s doors unlocking sounded as loud as a gunshot — Erica and Boyd flinched, crowding backwards against the white brick wall of the animal clinic. Derek rolled down the window to scowl at them, letting his eyes flash red.

“Get in.”

They glanced at each other, then at him, something unsettled and uncertain in their eyes. Derek forced his face to remain hard and aloof. He’d been too easy with them at the clinic last night, when he’d thought they were going to die. In their weakness, it had been okay to pet and reassure them, to tell them that they still belonged to him. Now he needed to reassert his authority, to remind them that they were strong.

They hurried to obey, ducking their heads to avoid Derek’s gaze in the rearview mirror as they slid into the backseat — through the clinic window, he saw Deaton watching them, frowning. Derek nodded, and Deaton’s hand lifted in return. Erica and Boyd gripped each other’s hands as Derek pulled away from the curb.

Derek left the window down to air out the heady scents of fear and anxiety hemorrhaging off of them. It made him dizzy, made the wolf inside him want to bite and tear, so Derek focused instead on the anger he’d felt when they told him they were leaving. He gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles whitened, taking comfort in the shallow cuts his human fingernails left on his palms.

Nobody spoke until he turned down the road towards the nature conservancy, and the old house beyond it.

“We’re not going to the station?” Erica asked, darting a nervous glance at Derek.

He shook his head. “We were only at the station before because the hunters had taken my old house. Now that they’re gone, we need to take it back again. We’re strongest on our own territory.”

Boyd swallowed. “How do we know they won’t try to take it back again?”

“Humans aren’t that different from wolves,” Derek said. “With their leader dead, the Argents are like a pack without an alpha. It will take time for them to regroup.”

“Gerard was that important to them?” Boyd asked.

Derek shook his head. “Not Gerard. Victoria.”

They’d reached the driveway. As Derek turned down it, he braced himself for the shock of the charred and broken line of the roof against the cornflower hue of the sky. It never seemed to matter how many times he saw the house — each time, the sight hit him as brutally as it had when he’d been sixteen, and staring at the still smoldering embers, his head rolling with the scents of burnt flesh and agony, the slow, sickening knowledge of betrayal.

Peter stood in the doorway waiting for them. He smiled brightly as the three of them made their way towards the steps. The porch beneath Peter’s feet looked wrong, fuzzy somehow, as though the thick carpet of ash was moving. As they drew closer, Derek realized why — spiders, ants, centipedes, and glossy black beetles swarmed around his feet, covering the floorboards and the supple Italian leather of Peter’s shoes. Peter seemed oblivious to them. He didn’t even flinch when a centipede the size of Derek’s index finger wormed its way up beneath the cuff of his trousers.

“I made breakfast,” Peter said, turning a too-bright smile on Erica and Boyd. “You’re probably hungry after the night you’ve had.”

They glanced back at Derek, eyes wide with fear. At his small nod, they steeled themselves, stepping past Peter and into the doorway. Insects crunched beneath their feet, and they winced, hunching their shoulders and tucking their chins down as they trudged through the doorway. Derek held Peter’s gaze for a long moment before following them inside.

Peter had found a yellow-checkered blanket somewhere, and had spread it over blackened dining room floor, picnic style, in the exact same place where the huge, oak table used to stand. On the blanket sat red Solo cups full of orange juice and paper plates heaped with sausage links, scrambled eggs, and buttered toast. Erica and Boyd cautiously settled on the edge of the blanket, their stomachs growling audibly at the sight of food. However, they didn’t reach for their own plates until Derek had speared a sausage on the tines of his plastic fork and bitten into it. Only then did they tear into their breakfast, ravenous, as though they hadn’t eaten for days.

Derek frowned. They’d never shown that deference to him before at mealtimes — born wolves were raised knowing to let the alpha eat first, but bitten wolves had to be trained to it, as with so many other aspects of their culture. In the frantic months after he’d bitten Erica, Boyd, and Isaac, teaching them proper table manners had been the least of his concerns. The alpha pack had obviously seen things differently.

“Coffee?” Peter asked, emerging from the kitchen with the French press. Derek accepted a paper cup of it, suddenly reminded of Stiles. Heat pooled in his stomach, and he closed his eyes, taking a long sip of the coffee to hide his reaction. He could feel Peter’s gaze on him, curious. Squaring his shoulders, he brushed off the reaction as a wolf’s sensory memory during a stressful encounter, nothing more. To further distract himself, he turned his attention to Erica and Boyd, who had mostly finished eating.

“You need to tell me what happened with the alpha pack,” he said.

Erica snorted. “We got the shit kicked out of us, that’s what.”

“They had you for five days,” Derek said. “Why did they wait so long to make a move?”

Boyd gave him an incredulous look. “They broke every bone in my legs and feet on day one,” he said. “Trust me, they weren’t waiting.”

“But they didn’t try to draw me out until yesterday,” Derek said. “Why?”

Erica crossed her arms across her chest, glaring. “Well, obviously nothing they did counted until it involved _you_.”

Derek growled low in his throat, making Boyd and Erica start backwards, but it was Peter who answered.

“To them, it didn’t,” he said. “They only respect other alphas. Two newly-turned omegas, who’d walked away from their pack . . . honestly, I’m surprised they didn’t just kill you.”

“We . . . We didn’t tell them about that part,” Boyd admitted, looking at the ground. “The walking away from the pack, part.”

Erica nodded sullenly. “The twins wanted to kill us,” she said. “But Rachel said we smelled like you.” She bit her lip, and glanced quickly up at Derek, then at the ground. “She said the Hale name still carried a lot of influence. She didn’t want to risk making you mad until . . . “

“Until she saw that we were too weak to fight them,” Derek said. Erica nodded.

Boyd frowned thoughtfully, tapping his fingers on the rim of his Solo cup. “I don’t think it was entirely her decision,” he said. “She kept calling these other people. A group of them were Skyping yesterday morning.” He shrugged. “I was pretty out of it by then.”

Peter leaned back on his elbows, crossing his feet at the ankles. “She’s a unit commander,” he said. “That’s how their pack works. It’s too large for a single alpha to run everything, especially since each pack member is an alpha in their own right. What single wolf would be powerful enough to control an entire pack of alphas? Instead they’re divided into several packs, each with one of the strongest alphas placed in charge of it. Those lead alphas run the pack jointly, through a council. They make their decisions by consensus.”

“How did you know that?” Derek asked, hearing the growl in his voice.

Peter gave him a pitying look. “Your parents and I were discussing politics back when your sister could still convince you to have tea parties with her. The alpha pack was big news when it formed, Derek. Everybody knew about it.”

In the cracked pane of glass behind Peter, Derek could see the red burn of his eyes. He gritted his teeth, telling himself not to let Peter goad him. From the edge of the blanket, Boyd and Erica were watching them warily.

Derek took a deep breath, willing his claws to recede. “Okay,” he said. “This is what’s going to happen. You two are going to write down everything you remember about your time with them,” he said to Boyd and Erica. “Don’t talk while you’re writing — I don’t want you to influence each other.”

“Homework? Really?” Boyd asked. “It’s summer vacation!”

“Yes, really,” Derek said. “Be grateful that I’m letting you rest. Tomorrow you start training again — when they come back, you need to be ready to fight them.” He turned his attention to Peter. “And you,” he said, never breaking eye contact, “will tell me everything you know about the alpha pack. Starting right now.”

* * *

After three hours, Stiles decided the Jeep’s interior was as clean as it was ever going to get. The upholstery would never look the same again, and he was probably going to have to invest in some seat covers, but at least his dad wouldn’t arrest him if he happened to glance in the backseat. Stiles left the windows open to air out the overpowering scent of Lysol layered over dried blood, and tossed the stained shop towels in the washer, hoping that a healthy dose of bleach would make it look less like he’d been cleaning up after a murder scene, and more like he’d used them to mop up . . . spilled V8? Puke, maybe? He’d have to come up with a good excuse in case his dad asked about them.

Feeling hot, sticky, and seriously in need of a shower, Stiles trudged up the stairs to his room. He’d stripped his plaid shirt off and launched it into the hamper, and was reaching for the hem of his t-shirt when he glanced up at his own reflection in the window and saw somebody standing behind him.

His heart seized, and he jumped backwards, flailing for a weapon. He remembered a hand slapping over his mouth and strong arms dragging him away from the lacrosse field. The sound of his name, and the heat of strong hands curling around his elbows snapped him back to reality. Stiles glanced down at the lacrosse stick that he’d snapped into a defensive position without realizing it. Then he glared at Derek, because that, at least, felt almost normal, or at least as normal as his life got these days.

“What the hell! You decided one time creeping around my room wasn’t enough? Is this going to be a thing with you now? Should I have Dad pick up your favorite kind of lunch meat in case you get bored and want to make a snack while you’re lurking in my bedroom like a psycho?”

“Tuna,” Derek said.

Stiles opened his mouth, then closed it. “Really?”

Derek snatched the lacrosse stick from Stiles’s hands, and slammed him down into the desk chair. “No, not really.”

Keeping one hand braced on Stiles’s shoulder, as though worried he’d try to escape, Derek leaned over him and opened the top drawer of the desk. He didn’t comment on the half-empty tube of hand lotion, but Stiles felt his cheeks burn regardless.

“Holy shit, do you have any concept of privacy? Any at all?”

Ignoring him, Derek fished out the battered spiral notebook that Stiles had used for most of his class notes, but hadn’t bothered recycling yet, since half of the pages were still empty. Laying it open on the desk, Derek flipped past the pages of chemistry and history notes, outlines for English essays, to-do lists, werewolf research, and a few sonnets dedicated to Lydia’s strawberry blonde hair. The margins were all filled with doodles of Scott, their teachers, superheroes, Lydia, pretty much whomever Stiles’s brain had landed on at that moment. Derek paused at the sight of a particularly unflattering sketch of himself, arms crossed and scowling at Stiles’s trigonometry homework with red eyes.

Stiles groaned, and buried his face in his hands. “If you’re going to kill me, just do it quickly. This week has sucked enough already.”

Derek glanced at him sidelong. His gaze flicked from Stiles’s face to his flank and back, almost as if he could sense the half-healed bruises hidden beneath the layers of shirts.

“Yeah,” Derek said, his voice going soft, like it had been in the clinic last night with Erica and Boyd. “It has.”

He flipped past the sketch of himself without comment, and kept going until he came across a blank page. Nabbing a sharpie from the cup on Stiles’s desk, he leaned over Stiles’s shoulder and drew something on the page. Stiles found himself staring at Derek’s hands, maybe because he’d never seen something as mundane as a Sharpie in them before. The skin on the back of Derek’s hands looked soft, no scars or freckles that Stiles could see. Werewolf healing, Stiles supposed. For a second, he wondered if Derek was that flawless all over, before his brain spooked away from the thought and focused instead on the symbol Derek had drawn.

“What’s that?” Stiles asked, trying to figure out why it looked familiar.

“It’s a triskellion.”

“Like your tattoo?”

Derek gave him a withering look. “Yes,” he said. “Like my tattoo.”

Stiles mentally compared the triskellion to the ink between Derek’s shoulder blades. Where the spiral arms of Derek’s tattoo were all sinuous curve (and, oh, it disturbed Stiles that his mind could draw up such a realistic image of Derek’s naked chest and back), this was all straight lines and sharp angles. It reminded Stiles a bit of a swastika, and he frowned, tapping it with his fingers.

“What does it mean?” he asked, mentally sorting through the various interpretations of the triskellion that he’d read online. He might, possibly, have looked it up after seeing Derek shirtless for the first time.

Derek sighed, shaking his head. “I’m not sure.”

Stiles thought his eyes were going to bug right out of his head. “Dude! You got something tattooed on your body without even knowing what it means? What, were you drunk?”

Derek glared at him, and Stiles lifted his hands, palms out.

“Right,” he said. “Werewolves can’t get drunk. Forget I said that.” A new thought occurred to him, and he frowned. “Wait a second. How can werewolves even get tattoos? Wouldn’t your freaky healing powers take care of it? Unless . . . oh, the ink has wolfsbane in it, doesn’t it?”

Derek’s hand closed roughly around the nape of Stiles’s neck, not threatening, exactly, but definitely not friendly either. Stiles’s mouth closed reflexively, more from the heat of Derek’s hand than from any actual fear that Derek would snap his spine or slam his face down into the desk. For all of his threats, he didn’t think Derek would actually hurt him. And maybe Derek knew that too, because he didn’t bother to threaten Stiles, only gave him a little shake before lifting his hand away. Stiles shivered at the sudden chill, the skin on his neck tingling, as if still feeling ghostly fragments of Derek’s touch.

“It’s an ancient symbol,” Derek said, glaring at him. “It can have different interpretations.” And yeah, Stiles’s research might have indicated that.

“So what’s yours mean?” he asked.

“It’s a reminder,” Derek said. “That every wolf can play three roles.”

“Alpha, beta, and omega.”

Derek gave him a little nod that would have been insulting (really, that shit was so basic that Stiles had picked it up in, like, his first five minutes of werewolf Googling), except that it was more acknowledgment than Stiles had ever gotten from Derek before.

Stiles nodded, tapping the squared off triskellion Derek had drawn. “Then what does this one mean?”

“That’s what I’m not sure about,” Derek said. “The alpha pack drew it on my door last week.”

Stiles gaped at him. “Alpha pack?”

Derek gave him a disbelieving look. “How can this be news to you? You were there last night!”

“Well, yeah, but . . . “ Stiles shook his head, letting the import of Derek’s words sink into him. “They’re _all_ alphas? How is that even possible?”

“It goes against everything I’ve been taught,” Derek said, looking frustrated. “I heard of this group when I was younger. They were always on the fringes of things. No one respected them. While my parents were alive, they’d never have dared to come to Beacon Hills. But they’ve been growing more powerful these last few years.”

“What do they want?”

Derek pinched the bridge of his nose. “Think, Stiles. Any wolf can become an alpha, a beta, or an omega. You’re a pack entirely composed of alphas, and you want to stay in power. What do you do?”

Realization dawned on Stiles, and he felt sick. “Take out the betas and the omegas,” he said.

Derek nodded.

Stiles swallowed, his heart hammering in his chest. “Shit.”

“Exactly.”

“So, what do you want me to do? Research this? Peter probably has better info than anything I can dig up on Google.”

“I don’t trust Peter!”

“But you trust me?” Stiles asked.

Derek glared at him. “I don’t trust anybody.”

“That’s . . . kind of sad, dude,” Stiles said.

Derek shrugged. “That’s how the world works.” He was probably aiming for nonchalant, but there was a note of sorrow in his voice that Stiles couldn’t help but pick up on. Shaking his head as if to clear it, Derek glared down at the notebook. “Just . . . see what you can find,” he said. “You probably won’t turn up anything, but the pack has gained a lot of power over the last few years. They might have slipped up somewhere. You can’t grow that much that quickly without making a few mistakes.”

“All right,” Stiles said. “Research. I can do that.”

He expected Derek to leave, but the werewolf remained crouching beside his desk chair, something oddly tentative in his expression. Derek’s lips tightened into a thin line, and he glanced at Stiles sidelong, as though trying to make up his mind about something.

Finally, he said, “I need you to talk to Scott for me. He’s not safe alone.”

“That’s what you said about the Argents,” Stiles said, then jumped when Derek slammed his hand down on the desk. The notebook, Stiles’s laptop, and the scattered papers on it all jumped a little.

“Damnit, Stiles! Scott managed to outsmart Gerard with Deaton’s help. But there are multiple alphas in town. Scott can’t even hold his own against me. He needs to join my pack if he wants to survive.”

There was something tight and hurt in his voice that made Stiles maybe want to reach out, to squeeze Derek’s shoulder if he knew it wouldn’t get his hand bitten off. He remembered Derek’s expression when Scott had said that he wasn’t his alpha. Even then, Stiles had thought it was kind of a shitty thing to say.

“Look,” Stiles said. “Scott’s been kind of a dick to you. I freely admit that. But what makes you think he’ll listen to me?”

“You’re his best friend,” Derek said. “He trusts you. You’re,” he shrugged, muscles working tightly in his throat. “You’re his pack, Stiles.”

Stiles snorted. “Not a werewolf,” he reminded Derek.

Derek glanced at him sidelong. Stiles’ breath hitched at the intensity in his eyes. “Do you want to be?”

Stiles’s heart suddenly hammered in his ears. He focused his attention on keeping his pulse steady. “From what I’ve seen,” he said, “being a werewolf looks like a lot more trouble than it’s worth.”

“Hanging out with werewolves when you’re not strong enough to defend yourself also looks like a hassle. But you do it anyway. Why?”

Stiles tilted his chin, insulted. “Why do you think? Scott’s like a brother to me.”

“Exactly,” Derek said. “He’s Pack.”

Stiles looked down at the desk, unable to handle the intensity of Derek's gaze. "I'll try," he said. “But it would work better if you talked to him yourself.”

“I’m trying to work on Jackson,” Derek said, sounding a little bit lost. Stiles felt for him. He wouldn’t want to have to work with Jackson, either. But then, Derek had clearly brought that problem on himself.

“You know what your problem is?” Stiles said. Derek gave him a warning look, but Stiles ignored it, pushing on. “You keep approaching everyone in the creepiest way possible, sneaking up behind them in dark corners and bedrooms and morgues — yeah, don’t think Erica didn’t tell me about that. Now don’t get me wrong. You’re good at the whole creeper thing. Seriously. A+. But if you want people to actually work with you, you’ve got to be more above board. You’ve got to make it, like, official.”

“Official,” Derek repeated, sounding dubious.

Stiles nodded, waving his hands in the air to show what a phenomenal idea it was. “Yeah! You want them to see you as a leader, not like someone who’s thinking about gutting them and stealing their lunch money.”

“I might be thinking about gutting you,” Derek said.

Stiles gave him a look. “Really? Dude, I’m trying to help you here.” He spun around in his desk chair, trying to think. “You want to know who else lurks around dressed all in black, and keeps trying to get people to do insane things?”

“No,” Derek said. “But you’re going to tell me anyway, aren’t you?”

“Nick Fury,” Stiles pushed on, ignoring him.

Derek stared at him blankly.

Stiles felt his mouth drop open. He and Scott had seen _The Avengers_ three times in the theater. He thought everybody had seen it at least once. “Seriously?” he said. “Derek, you are making me weep for your life. Didn’t you even see Iron Man?”

“I know who Nick Fury is,” Derek said tightly. “I don’t know why you’re talking about him.”

“Because,” Stiles said, “you’re basically trying to put together a team of superheroes here! Well, werewolves. But really, they’re pretty much the same thing.”

Derek touched his forehead, like it was starting to hurt. People did that a lot around Stiles. “I’m trying to put together a _pack_.”

“Yeah,” Stiles said. “And that’s basically a group of super wolves. Minus the crime fighting and everything. Although if werewolves did fight crime, that would be awesome. You could totally get Scott on board if you let him fight crime.”

“Do you even listen to yourself?” Derek asked.

“No, hear me out!” Stiles said. “What you need to do is hold a meeting. Make it official. Werewolves Assemble! Hey, want me to put together some minutes and a mission packet for you? I can totally do that.”

“Why do we need a meeting?” Derek asked.

Stiles rolled his eyes. “Dude. Everybody holds meetings. Even the top-secret club that Scott and I started back in second grade held meetings. Meetings make things official. They make it look like you’ve got your shit together. And, Derek, no offense, but you definitely need to get your shit together.”

“Fine,” Derek snapped. “We’ll meet at my house tomorrow night. Make sure Scott and Isaac come.”

“Awesome!” Stiles said, pumping his fist in the air. Then a new thought occurred to him, and he frowned. “Wait a second. Won’t Isaac already be there?”

“Just make sure that he comes,” Derek repeated, starting towards the window.

“Fine, relax,” Stiles said, holding up his hands. “Me, Scott, and Isaac. We’ll be there. I’ll bring minutes. Hey, should we have a secret handshake to get in or something?”

In response, Derek flexed the fingers of one hand and shot his claws out, the motion smooth, practiced, and entirely bad-ass. Stiles swallowed, refusing to be impressed.

“Okay,” he said. “I guess that will work.”

* * *

Derek’s hand was already on the latch to Jackson’s window before he realized that his newest beta wasn’t alone — Lydia’s head rested on Jackson’s bare shoulder, her hair spilling across his chest in copper waves that gleamed in the early morning sunlight. Jackson’s corded arms held her close, and one manicured hand gripped his shoulder protectively. For a second, Derek hesitated. This wasn’t a scenario he’d ever had to deal with before. Isaac didn’t seem to know that girls existed, and Boyd only had eyes for Erica. Chris Argent would never have let Allison spend the night at Scott’s house, and Stiles . . .

The narrow window ledge he held for balance splintered beneath the sudden pressure of Derek’s hand. The very thought of finding someone wrapped around Stiles made the wolf rise up in Derek, fierce and possessive, though he had no idea why. He took a deep breath, reaching for the cold burn of anger inside of him to force the wolf back down. It made no sense for the thought of somebody in Stiles’s bed to upset him, or rather, his wolf, since the rest of Derek obviously didn’t care what Stiles did. Was it just that Stiles had harbored him once when he was a fugitive? Perhaps the wolf saw Stiles’s room as a safe place, an extension of the den, and bristled at the thought of another intruding into it. That must be it. Disturbed by his momentary loss of control, Derek slipped the window latch and slid over the sill into Jackson’s bedroom.

Jackson woke at once, his eyes glowing blue as he bolted to the foot of the bed and crouched there, growling. Lydia made a high, panicked sound, too quiet to be a scream, and shuffled backwards until her back hit the headboard, clutching a sheet to her chest. Derek could tell the exact moment she recognized him. The fear faded from her eyes, and she tossed her hair, arranging herself more comfortably on the mattress, like a queen preparing to greet a guest, while Jackson growled at her feet. Locking eyes with him, Derek bared his fangs and flexed his claws, gratified when Jackson swallowed and looked away, falling silent.

Lydia’s eyes narrowed at that, and she fixed Derek with a hard look that made him glad she’d been immune to Peter’s bite. If Lydia were a werewolf, Derek had no doubt that she’d start plotting to take him down before she’d even finished her first full moon. Lydia would never be satisfied to play beta to somebody else’s alpha.

“Derek,” she said, “I’m giving you five minutes to explain.”

“And then what?” Derek asked. “You’ll scream?” He smiled, letting the tips of his fangs show. 

“No.” Without taking her eyes from Derek, she reached to the bedside table and found her phone. “I’ll call Allison.”

Derek couldn’t entirely keep himself from wincing. Since Gerard’s death, he didn’t quite know where he stood with the Argents, but after everything that had happened, Derek wasn’t eager to see how they’d react if Lydia said he’d been threatening her. He glared at Lydia, and she smiled sweetly in return. Jackson climbed back up the bed to sit beside her, his confidence visibly bolstered.

“Start talking,” Lydia said, tapping her phone.

Derek drew in a deep breath, then let it out, trying not to let his irritation show on his face. “We need to meet,” he said.

“We’re meeting now,” Jackson said, rolling his eyes.

“No,” Derek said. “All of us. The whole pack. I called a meeting at nine o’clock tonight at the old train station on the south end of town. You know where it is?”

Jackson snorted. “Yeah,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to show up there. I already told you, Derek. I’m not a part of your pack.”

Derek lifted an eyebrow. “When the alpha pack comes back, you don’t want to be on your own.”

“Really?” Jackson said. “Because the only person I see alone is you.” 

But Lydia was frowning. “What alpha pack?”

“I told you,” Jackson said, “we ran into some other wolves last night. It was no big deal. Peter scared them off.”

“Peter,” Derek snapped, “negotiated a cease fire. But it’s only temporary. They’ll be back, and this time, they’ll bring their whole pack, not just a handful of scouts. We need to be ready for them.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with me,” Jackson said. “You’re the one they seem to have a problem with.”

Derek cocked his head at him. “Really. And do you think they also had a problem with Boyd and Erica?”

At that, Jackson frowned, and Lydia pursed her lips.

“They respect alphas and they tolerate betas,” Derek said. “Omegas they kill on sight. If I hadn’t claimed them, Erica and Boyd will be dead.”

Jackson lifted his chin. “Erica and Boyd are losers,” he said. “I’m not.” His mask of confidence had slipped back into place almost completely, but Lydia was frowning, looking thoughtful. Derek addressed his next words to her.

“The train station,” he repeated. “Nine o’clock. Be there, or see how much they care about your homecoming crowns.”

To be continued . . . 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter will be up within a few days. Until then, comments and constructive criticism are always appreciated. Also, feel free to follow me on LJ or Twitter -- my username is Piscaria on both sites. Thanks for reading!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry it's taken me so long to update! Work has kept me on my toes this month. But things are settling down, so I should finally be able to settle into a regular posting schedule.
> 
> Thanks as always to Drew for talking through my ideas and making me step up my game. <3

Since Scott knew he was coming, Stiles didn’t bother knocking. He let himself in with the key he’d made, and waved cheerfully at Scott’s mom, who was curled up on the sofa watching TV. She just shook her head and sighed. Stiles bounded up the stairs to Scott’s room, but paused at the light streaming out from behind the guest room door, which had been left cracked open.

Scott and his mom never used the guest room. In fact, the term “guest room” was a bit of a stretch — there was a futon in there, sure, but the room so crowded with rubbermaid storage bins, old exercise equipment, and the boxes of crap that Scott’s dad had left behind that even picking your way over to it was a challenge. And that wasn’t counting all the stuff piled on top of it. Stiles had always slept in Scott’s room when he came over. He’d never seen Scott or his mom go in there.

Frowning, Stiles pulled the door open wider to get a glimpse inside. Aside from a few boxes stacked neatly in one corner, the clutter was gone. The sewing table (and Stiles always thought it was weird that they had one when Scott’s mom didn’t actually sew) had been cleared off, save for a stack of textbooks, a desk lamp, and pencil cup. There was a scuffed and battered dresser pushed against the wall, and the futon had been neatly made with Scott’s old Batman comforter. And sprawled across Batman’s face was Isaac, a laptop open in front of him. He glanced up as Stiles peeked inside.

“Hey, Stiles.”

Stiles opened his mouth, then closed it. “What the holy fuck?” 

“Language!” Scott’s mom called from downstairs.

Gripping the back of his head, Stiles turned from the open doorway, frantically trying to take in the implications of what he’d just seen.

“Stiles?” Scott asked, bursting out of his own room. He froze at the sight of Stiles’s posture and Isaac’s open door. “Oh,” he said, shoving his pants into his pockets. “Yeah. I was going to tell you.”

Catching hold of Scott’s elbow, Stiles propelled him back into his room, slamming the door shut behind him. It wouldn’t keep Isaac from listening in, but the crash of the door definitely made Stiles feel better.

“What the hell, Scott?” 

Scott swallowed, looking away. “I told you he was staying over.”

“You told me he was spending the night! Scott, there is a huge difference between spending the night and moving into your spare room!” Stiles threw his hands into the air to illustrate how big. 

Scott shrugged. “It’s just for awhile.” 

“You cleaned out the room!” Stiles was pacing from one side of Scott’s room to the other now, his body doing its best to keep up with the whirlwind of thoughts and emotions. “That room has not been fit for human habitation in over a decade!”

“Why do you even care?” Scott asked, looking annoyed now.

Dumbfounded, Stiles just stared at him. “Dude! I’m your best friend! When somebody moves into your house, you’re supposed to tell me.”

“Well maybe I didn’t because I knew you’d act like this!” Scott snapped.

It felt like the blood froze in his veins. When the thaw came, half a second later, it nearly pulled Stiles under, heat flooding up through his cheeks and blood pounding in his ears. “Fine,” Stiles said. He barely recognized the sound of his own voice, cool as sea glass. “You’re right. It’s none of my business.”

“Stiles,” Scott started, laying a hand on his shoulder. Stiles shrugged him off.

“Whatever,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s go.” He didn’t raise his voice when he added, “You too, Isaac.”

“I didn’t mean it that way!” Scott said, even as Isaac stepped inside, not even bothering to pretend that he hadn’t been eavesdropping. Isaac glanced awkwardly from Scott to Stiles.

“Are we all good?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Stiles snapped, pushing past him, through the doorway. “We’re peachy. Come on, I don’t want to be late.”

“Who cares?” Scott muttered. “I don’t even want to go to this stupid meeting.”

Stiles ignored him, starting down the stairs. 

Behind him, he heard Isaac say, “Come on. You know if we don’t show up, Derek will just turn up here, anyway.” 

After a pause, both of their footsteps started after Stiles. Gritting his teeth, Stiles stormed out the front door, towards his Jeep. It took every ounce of willpower he had not to take off without them, make them walk to the Hale house. Slamming the driver’s side door behind him, Stiles tipped his head back against the headrest, taking a long, calming breath. 

Derek had damned well better appreciate this.

* * *

Derek was going to kill Stiles. Slowly, he decided, and painfully. He glared down at his phone, which now read, “8:58.” The meeting was supposed to start in two minutes, and nobody had arrived yet. Peter was smirking at Derek from across the room, and Erica and Boyd kept shooting him worried glances from where they sat on the threadbare couch they’d found on the side of the road. The dark circles beneath their eyes and their dull skin and hair made those glances especially pathetic, so Derek scowled out at the darkening sky to get away from them. Not for the first time, he wondered why he’d let Stiles talk him into a meeting. He should have known better. People didn’t show up because Derek asked. They showed up because he bullied them into it. Now he was going to look like an idiot, and he’d have to fight even harder to get their respect.

He heard the rumble of the Jeep’s engine before he saw its headlights winding down the long driveway. Some of the tension eased from Derek’s shoulders, but he still stepped onto the porch to watch Stiles drift to a stop beside the Camaro. Scott and Isaac climbed out immediately. Isaac gave a cautious nod to Derek, while Scott just glared at him. But Stiles hesitated inside the Jeep for a moment, resting his head on the center of the steering wheel.

Something was off between the three of them, Derek realized. Scott’s expression hovered somewhere between stubborn and sheepish, and Isaac walked a little too close to him, practically gripping his sleeve. When Stiles finally opened the door and climbed out of the driver’s seat, his movements were tight and controlled for once, his brows drawn low over his eyes. He marched past Scott and Isaac without looking at either of them. Only when he started up the steps to the porch did Derek notice the papers fisted in his hand.

“Here,” Stiles said, thrusting the packet at Derek. Scott and Isaac took advantage of Derek’s distraction to hurry past them, into the house.

The brightly colored ink drew Derek’s eyes, and he tapped one finger against the clip art claw marks running down the center of the page. “What the hell is this?”

“It’s an agenda,” Stiles said. “I told you I’d make one.” The glare he leveled at Derek was obviously half-hearted, and he deflated after a second. “Look,” he said, reaching to take the paper back. “If you don’t want to use it, that’s fine. I just thought . . .”

“No!” Derek said, gripping the paper hard enough to wrinkle it. “I’ll use it.” 

The expression Stiles shot him was surprised, but pleased. Embarrassed, Derek pressed his lips into a thin line. He wasn’t about to explain that, garish as the agenda was, it didn’t end the way any of his own projections for the meeting inevitably had — with Derek beating the shit out of Scott, Jackson, and possibly Isaac, until the three of them agreed to work with him. 

“Are those extras?” Derek asked, glancing at the remaining printouts in Stiles’s hand. At Stiles’s nod, he said, “Pass them out.”

Stiles stepped into the house, and Derek lingered on the porch a moment longer. He leaned against the doorframe and skimmed over the agenda, trying to make it look like he wasn’t listening intently for the hum of Jackson’s Porsche. From the heat of Peter’s gaze burning between his shoulder blades, he guessed he wasn’t doing a good enough job. When Derek glanced at his phone, it said 9:05. Deciding that he would deal with Jackson in his own way, later, Derek stepped into the house.

For a moment, he studied the group. Peter stood alone at the back of the room. In his dark trousers and charcoal gray shirt, he looked like he might blend right into the charred walls. Unsurprisingly Isaac had squeezed onto the sofa with Erica and Boyd. The three of them were talking, quietly — Isaac asking how they were doing, Erica and Boyd insisting that they’d more-or-less healed. Scott had dropped into one of the folding chairs beside the sofa, sitting close to Isaac. He scowled when he saw Derek watching him, slumping deeper into the chair and crossing his arms. A cluster of empty chairs sat beside him, and Derek would have expected Stiles to have taken one of them. But Stiles had dragged his chair to the opposite side of the sofa, away from Scott. He was glaring down at the agenda in his hands, tapping one finger in a staccato rhythm against his knee. For a second, Derek let himself wonder what had happened between Scott and Stiles, before deciding it was inconsequential. Stiles had done his job by bringing Scott and Isaac. As long as the two betas weren’t too distracted, Derek didn’t care what high school drama they’d embroiled themselves in.

Derek let the door crash shut behind him, and the teenagers jumped, shooting nervous glances in his direction. Drawing himself up to his full height. Derek let his eyes flash red. “You’re all here because we’re in danger,” he said. “If any of us want to survive when the alpha pack returns, we need to work together.”

Stiles made a choking noise.

Derek glared at him. “Yes?”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” At Derek’s blank stare, Stiles shook his head, rustling the agenda pointedly. “The check in?” 

Derek glanced down at the agenda in his hand. Sure enough, it read, **Item One: _Check In Question_**. Right. He could do this.

“Scott!” Derek barked. “What did you have for dinner?”

For a second, they all stared at him like he’d grown an extra head. Derek crossed his arms and glared pointedly at each of them. When they were all shifting uncomfortably, afraid to meet his eyes, he nodded in satisfaction. “Scott?” he said again.

“Um,” Scott said, still looking thrown. “Mom made meatloaf.”

“It was good,” Isaac offered. Derek didn’t miss the way Stiles glowered at him from across the room.

Deciding that had counted as Isaac’s turn, Derek said, “Boyd?”

The look Boyd sent him was decidedly unimpressed. “Dude, we all had spaghetti,” he said. “You were there. Erica made salad.”

“But Boyd fixed the sauce,” Erica said, beaming up at him from where her head rested on his shoulder. “He adds things to the stuff you get in the can. Spices and shit.”

“Oh,” Boyd said reluctantly, “and Peter got garlic bread.”

“And a nice red blend,” Peter added from the back wall.

Scott was staring at them. “Wait,” he said. “You guys have been staying here? Have you even been home? Since . . . ?”

Erica slumped deeper into Boyd’s side. “Mom and I aren’t exactly on speaking terms right now.”

“And with everything that keeps happening,” Boyd said, “I don’t exactly want to bring that home to my grandma, you know? She’s got enough to deal with.”

Deciding it was time to re-focus the conversation, Derek snapped, “Stiles!”

Stiles startled, nearly falling off the folding chair. Derek rolled his eyes at him, and lifted the agenda pointedly.

“Oh,” Stiles said, ducking his head. “Yeah. I had Hot Cheetos. And a Mountain Dew.” At Derek’s raised eyebrow, he snapped, “Look, I was busy! And I figured I’d bring Dad a burger tonight, since he’s working late.”

Awkward silence followed his words. Finally, Scott said, “Did we really come here to talk about dinner? This is stupid!” 

For once, Derek was inclined to agree with him. 

Of course, Scott followed that up with, “I don’t see why we’ve got to play werewolf club. I’m not even in your stupid pack.”

The death glare Erica shot Scott in response would have been more effective without the shadows under her eyes. “If you’d spent five minutes with the alphas, you’d know how lucky we are to have a pack!” she snarled, her eyes flashing amber for a second.

Scott rolled his eyes. “Seriously?” he said. “No offense, but I could kick both of your asses.”

“You could try,” Boyd rumbled, shifting forward on the couch.

Isaac swallowed audibly. “No one wants to fight, man,” he said. “Right?” he asked Scott.

Scott glared at Boyd, but nodded sharply. 

“Dude, but Scott knows everything,” Stiles said from across the room. “He is clearly the expert on werewolves here.”

“Shut up, Stiles!” Scott snapped.

“No, I think he’s got a point,” Boyd said. 

Erica nodded vehemently. “You act like you’re so much better than us,” she said, glaring at Scott. “But you were only turned, what, four months ahead of us? You might like to think you’re an alpha, but the fuckers we met would eat you for breakfast.”  
Scott growled at that, claws digging into the cushion of his folding chair. “If I’m better than you, it’s because I wasn’t stupid enough to come lining up for this shit! Derek played you! All of you! But he’s not going to play me.”

“Dude, calm down,” Isaac said, resting a hand on Scott’s arm.

“Don’t tell me what to do!” Scott snapped, and Isaac looked stung.

“Everybody shut up!” Derek roared.

The charred and brittle walls of the house shook under the impact of his voice, and the cracked windowpanes trembled in their frames. Boyd, Erica, and Isaac fell silent, holding themselves still, so as not to draw his attention. Peter lifted an eyebrow at him. Scott stared at him with a slack-mouthed expression growing steadily angrier. Stiles looked reluctantly impressed.

“Does anybody else have a problem with the agenda?” Derek asked, baring his fangs.

Boyd, Erica, and Isaac shook their heads quickly. Scott opened his mouth to speak, but quieted at Isaac’s pleading expression.

Derek gave the room one more red-eyed glare for good measure, then nodded, rolling his neck to force the wolf back down. “Good. Now it’s time for old business.” He heard the low hum of a Porsche engine wending up the road just as Boyd spoke.

“The Kanima,” Boyd read. “Hasn’t that all been sorted out?”

Derek could tell the other moment the other wolves in the room picked up the sound of the car engine. The fell quiet, cocking their head to the side and listening.

Stiles, unfortunately, didn’t notice. “Hey!” he said. “Weren’t you supposed to invite Jackson? The least he can do after trying to kill everyone is show up to the meeting.” Scott was shaking his head vigorously at him, but Stiles plowed on without noticing. “Where is that arrogant, piece of crap, fuckwit?”

Derek pinched the bridge of his nose. Erica stifled a giggle behind her hand.

Jackson stepped forward from the open doorway and smacked Stiles over the head, hard enough to hurt, but not to do any permanent damage. “I’m right here, asshole.”

Stiles yelped, covering his head with his hands. “A little warning?” he asked the room at large.

“You need to learn to pay attention,” Derek said. He turned his attention to Jackson. “And you’re late.”

Jackson rolled his eyes. “You’re lucky I showed up at all,” he said, and crossed to slouch into one of the empty chairs beside Scott. A second later, Lydia stepped through the doorway, two boxes from the downtown bakery balanced in her arms.

“Thanks for your help, Jackson,” she said, sweetness only amplifying the annoyance in her voice. Stiles surged to his feet to help her, knocking his chair over. She thrust the boxes into his arms and flipped her hair. “We brought sustenance,” she said to Derek with a vicious little smile. “No one should have to sit through something like this without chocolate.”

With the boxes balanced awkwardly in his arms, Stiles spent a moment looking around the room, no doubt hoping to find a table or another sanitary surface on which to set them. After a moment, he gave up. With the side of his sneaker, he cleared away the layer of ash, dust, and broken glass to reveal the cracked and blackened floorboards beneath. The white bakery boxes glittered there like diamonds when Stiles laid them down and flipped open the lids to reveal rows of tiny cupcakes topped with delicate swirls of icing. They gleamed against the wreckage of the floor like newly uncovered treasure — at least until the teenagers descended on them.

Derek watched from the wall as Stiles shoved one into his mouth whole, beaming at Lydia through a mouthful of cake and icing. Derek suppressed a smile when she just rolled her eyes. Nose wrinkling, Lydia looked from the folding chairs to the grimy walls, and one hand unconsciously smoothed the fabric of her dress. Clearly she didn’t trust it on any surface in the house. Everybody else was making their way back to their seats, cupcakes in hand. Even Peter was nibbling delicately on a vanilla cupcake. Finally, Lydia sighed loudly, and perched sideways on Jackson’s lap.

Someone tugged the sleeve of Derek’s jacket, and he glanced over to see Stiles holding a chocolate cupcake out to him. Derek lifted an eyebrow, and Stiles shook his head in exasperation.

“Dude, you should eat it! It will cut back on that whole huff-puff-and-blow-your-house-down thing you pulled earlier. Not that that wasn’t awesome!” he said quickly, at Derek’s glare.

“I could eat _you_ ,” Derek offered, smiling with teeth. He wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or annoyed that Stiles didn’t even pretend to look intimidated.

Instead, Stiles just lowered his voice, adding, “And if you’re worrying about poison, which, fair enough, it’s Lydia, Scott’s already had five of them. If there was any wolfsbane in them, he’d be dead by now. Come on. Live a little.”

Stiles danced the cupcake through the air towards Derek, who watched it approach through half-lidded eyes. Just as he was preparing to snatch the cupcake out of Stiles’s hand and smash it into his face, Stiles beamed at him and tossed it high into the air, dancing backwards. Derek caught it instinctively, and glared at Stiles, who was shaking his hips in some sort of ridiculous victory shimmy. Derek resisted the urge to throw it at him, but only because Stiles’s attempt to catch it would no doubt lead to icing smeared all over the walls and floor. The house had been through enough already.

“It’s time for new business,” Derek announced, spinning the cupcake in his hand, without biting into it. “As you all know, Erica and Boyd were captured by another pack two days ago. Peter negotiated a cease-fire with them, but it’s only temporary.” Derek tried to keep the hostility out of his voice when he addressed his uncle. “Peter, what can you tell us about the alpha pack?”

Peter licked a smudge of icing from the corner of his lips, and smiled winningly at the room. “I’m afraid I don’t know as much about them as my nephew might hope,” he said. “I was only a boy when I started to hear my parents whisper about a new pack rising up. A pack composed entirely of alphas. Throughout my childhood, they were considered a fringe element. They preyed on omegas, and occasionally risked taking on a weaker pack. They never dared to go for the stronger ones. A decade ago, they’d have never risked even stepping onto Hale lands. But in recent years, they’ve grown larger. Stronger. Even mid-sized packs have good reason to fear them now. They’re fascists. They believe the alpha form is where the natural evolution of the werewolf has led. They see betas and omegas as naturally inferior.”

“Is that why they use a Nazi symbol?” Stiles asked. “They’re like an alpha supremacy group?”

Peter showed no visible signs of surprise, but Derek heard his heartbeat falter. “Yes,” he said, looking at Stiles with something near respect. “You looked it up. Of course.” Peter’s gaze slid to Derek, who bit into his cupcake smugly. It wouldn’t do to let Peter think he was Derek’s sole source of information. Regaining his composure, Peter said, “Of course, the three-bladed swastika is an ancient symbol, long pre-dating the Nazis. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the alpha pack chose it. In any case, that’s the symbol they use to announce their presence in a territory.”

“That’s what I don’t get,” Stiles said. “Why did they announce their presence at all? They could have just swooped in and attacked.”

“You mean like they did to us?” Boyd asked, his eyes gleaming amber for a moment.

“No!” Stiles protested, then, seeming to reconsider it, said, “Well, yeah, but . . . why stop with just the two of you? Why not go after Derek? He’s the strongest,” he added quickly, when Derek glared at him. “It would make sense to get him out of the way first.”

“Werewolves have laws and customs just as humans do,” Peter said. “There are certain rules a pack needs to obey when it wants to challenge another pack for territory. As long as the alpha pack persists in following those rules, the surrounding packs in the region won’t rise up against it. Sure, people will grumble about it, but a pack has no right to remain in a territory that it can’t adequately defend from rival wolves.”

“But that’s not fair!” Scott said. “How can any pack be expected to fight off a whole pack of alphas?”

Derek gave him a hard look. “Nature isn’t fair,” he said. “The strong survive. The weak perish.”

“Besides,” Peter said, “a high-functioning pack depends on a balance of skills. You can’t solve every problem with a sledgehammer. The strongest packs always have a mix of bitten and born betas, and even a few humans, in addition to the alpha. The greater the variety of strengths in a pack, the greater the likelihood is that they’ll withstand a challenge.”

The others were nodding thoughtfully at this, but Scott still looked mulish. “But why does a pack need an alpha at all?”

“In a situation of conflict, a pack needs to make split-second decisions,” Derek said. “A clear leader makes that possible.” He caught the back of the nearest chair, which happened to be the one Stiles was sitting in, and squeezed the metal until it creaked and buckled beneath his hand. Stiles leaned so far to the side Derek thought he might pitch out of the chair entirely. Derek lifted his hand, leaving a vaguely fist-shaped hole in the seat back. Stiles ran a finger over it, nervously. Through his peripheral vision, Derek could see Stiles watching him with big eyes. “And sometimes,” Derek added, keeping his gaze fixed on Scott, “a sledgehammer is exactly what you need.”

Scott fumed, clearly searching for a response. 

Stiles gave a low whistle. “Okay,” he said. “So this is basically a pack of sledgehammers. I still want to know why they didn’t just pound the crap out of all of us. They obviously could have.” He fixed his attention on Peter. “What was it you asked for? A prorogation period?”

“Any pack with a new alpha is entitled to a season to settle its internal affairs before meeting a formal challenge,” Peter said. “We have until the Blood Moon to prepare ourselves to face them.”

“That’s in October,” Stiles said. Derek’s eyebrows lifted in surprise, and he nodded, though it hadn’t been a question.

“So what happens then?” Isaac asked nervously.

“The first thing they’ll do when they return is wipe out any omegas they find,” Derek said. “You all saw what they did to Erica and Boyd.” He looked over at Scott and Jackson. “You two need to join my pack if you want to survive.”

Jackson rolled his eyes. “Or I could just claw my eyes out. That sounds fun, too.”

“I’m not joining your pack!” Scott said. “Neither of us are.” He glanced at Jackson for confirmation. 

Jackson sighed, then nodded. “I hate to say it, but McCall is right,” he said. “Nobody’s joining your little club.”

“I’ve been fine on my own,” Scott said.

Boyd snorted. “Believe me,” he said. “These guys could eat you for breakfast.”

“The strength of the wolf is in the pack, Scott,” Peter said, his voice calm and reasonable.

Scott whirled on him. “Shut up! It’s your fault I’m like this in the first place!”

“True,” Peter said. He smiled cordially, but his eyes held pure venom. “And if I were still an alpha, believe me, we would not be having this conversation. Be grateful my nephew is more lenient than I.”

“I don’t need an alpha!” Scott swept a glance at the couch, where Erica, Boyd, and Isaac still sat, then returned his glare to Derek. “You might have fooled them into thinking being a werewolf is some fabulous gift, but I didn’t sign up for this.” 

“Okay, that’s enough!” Boyd snapped, surging to his feet. He crossed to stand beside Derek, Erica following a step behind him. They flanked Derek, standing close enough that he could feel the heat of their bodies even through his heavy leather jacket. The wolf inside him preened at the gesture, instinctively drawing strength from the pack. But Derek’s human side cringed, though he fought to keep it from showing on his features. Boyd and Erica might as well have drawn a line across the floor. 

Scott’s ears had flicked back, and he crouched low, ready to spring. The tension in the room was so tangible even the humans could feel it. Stiles’s body was tense, poised to run, and Lydia’s breath came in quick, sharp hitches. Beside her, Jackson had taken two steps forward, his wolf instinctively drawn to the display of pack strength, even as his human side recoiled from it. Scott’s eyes were glowing amber, his ears pointed. Derek kept his own face human and composed. 

Isaac looked from him to Derek, something pleading in his expression. “Come on,” he said. “Scott. Calm down, man.”

Scott didn’t spare a glance for him, his eyes locked with Derek’s in a challenge. His wolf ached to meet it. Erica and Boyd’s return had strengthened him, and the wolf prowled inside of Derek, sleek and hungry. His senses had amplified tenfold. He could feel the bite bonds linking him to Isaac and Jackson. They stretched through the air between them, invisible, but thrumming with power. With just a little tug, Derek could call both of them to him. Then it would be easy to close his fangs around Scott’s throat, force him to submit. Peter’s alpha claim would have faded with his death. Derek could replace it with his own, bind Scott to him as easily as any of the others. They were standing so closely together, glaring at each other, that Derek could see the sudden red in his own eyes reflected in Scott’s. The agenda fell to the floor. 

Then a warm body was squirming in between them, and Stiles was saying, “Scott. Scott! Snap out of it, buddy.”

“Get back, Stiles,” Scott growled.

The hairs on the back of Stiles’s neck rose at the threat, but Stiles refused to back down. Instead, he stepped even closer, poking Scott in the chest with one long finger. Something fierce and protective rose up inside of Derek, and he tamped it down. If Stiles hadn’t annoyed Scott into attacking him yet, it probably wasn’t ever going to happen. 

Scott’s growl deepened. “I said get back.”

“You don’t want to do this,” Stiles said. Derek couldn’t quite place the emotion in his voice — fear, yes, but also exhaustion. “You’re a lover, not a fighter, remember?”

“Things change,” Scott said, but his gaze had shifted from Derek to Stiles.

The laugh Stiles choked out was brittle as a dry bone. “No shit,” he said. “You’re preaching to the choir right now, dude.”

“Why are you doing this?” Scott asked. “Are you on his side now?”

Stiles sighed. “I’m not on anyone’s side, Scott,” he said. Derek could hear the truth in his heartbeat. “I just think you’re making a huge mistake. Come on. You saw what those guys did to Erica and Boyd. Just calm down. Think about this logically.”

“I am!” Scott cried. “You don’t get it!” He glared at Derek over Scott’s shoulder. “The bite doesn’t make us brothers! Even if we shared blood, it wouldn’t make us brothers! It takes more than that to make a family. I don’t even consider my own dad family!”

The words knifed through Derek, and he took an involuntary step backward, knocking into Boyd and Erica. Their hands hovered on his shoulders, but Derek shook them off.

“I know,” Stiles said to Scott. “Dude, I get it. But come on. Listen to me —“

“No,” Scott said. “Listening to you is what made me like this in the first place!”

Stiles stiffened as though he’d been slapped.

Scott kept speaking, the words gaining momentum. “I just wanted to go to bed that night! But you had to drag me through the woods. Why the hell couldn’t it have been you who got bit? You’re the one who gets off on this werewolf shit, not me!”

With Stiles’s back to him, Derek couldn’t see his expression, but he could taste the sudden salt tang of tears in the air. Stiles ducked his head, angrily wiping his eyes on the sleeve of his shirt.

In the silence, Peter said, “To be fair, I did offer.”

Stiles winced at the words. A spike of white-hot rage lanced through Derek, and he bared his fangs at his uncle. Peter only shrugged, looking far too amused.

Slowly, Stiles lifted his head. His neck and ears were flushed bright red. “You know what?” he said to Scott, his voice rough with emotion. “You’re right. I fucked up. But damn it, Scott, I’ve been trying to make it up to you every day since then!” 

The wolf drained from Scott’s features, and he looked stunned. “Fuck,” he said. “Stiles. Dude, I’m sorry.”

Stiles stumbled backwards, nearly crashing into Derek in his hurry to get away. “No,” he said. “I get it”

“Stiles, come on,” Scott said. “I didn’t mean it.”

A shuddering breath escaped Stiles, too broken to be a laugh. “Yeah you did.” He took a step backwards, towards the doorway, his eyes locked on Scott. “But it’s okay.” He shrugged. “It’s not like it’s nothing I didn’t know. I just need to . . . “ Stiles jerked his chin towards the door, and took another step backwards, straight into Jackson.

“Watch it, Stilinski!” Jackson growled, bumping him hard with his shoulder. “Some of us have better things to do than watch your little prima donna moment.”

All at once, Stiles had turned on Jackson, shoving him hard. “Shut up!” he yelled. “Just shut the fuck up! You think that just because you’re a werewolf now, that makes up for all the people you killed before? You’re lucky to even be alive right now. There were people at the sheriff’s office a hell of a lot better than you who are gone now!”

Jackson’s eyes glowed blue, and he lunged for Stiles, knocking him down to the floor. Stiles gasped in pain, and the scent of blood filled the room. Jackson tore his claws from Stiles’s shoulder, and flexed them, blood dripping down onto Stiles’s face.

“If you say another word, Stilinski —“ he growled.

Scott lunged for him. But Derek had an alpha’s speed, so he got there first. The floor shook when Jackson slammed into it, the shock and pain bringing the wolf fully into his features. Derek was on him before his sideburns had even finished forming, pinning Jackson with a knee in the center of his chest. He closed his hand around Jackson’s throat, letting his claws dig into the flesh a little. Stiles was picking himself off the floor a few feet away, his face blanched and his eyes wide and panicked. His shirt was soaked with blood at the shoulder. Lydia had a hand over her mouth. As Derek watched, Scott crossed to stand by Stiles, examining his wound.

Derek leaned low, growling into Jackson’s face. “If you ever threaten a pack human again, I will kill you. Do you understand?” He stayed there, glaring at Jackson, until the boy gave a shaky nod.

“Yeah!” he gasped. “Yeah. I get it.”

Derek slammed him back onto the floor, and stood, wiping his hands on his jeans. “The same goes for the rest of you,” he said. “I can always create more betas. But human pack members are rare. They must be protected. Anyone who breaks that rule answers to me. Understood?”

Erica, Boyd, and Isaac were nodding. Stiles just stared at Derek. Scott had removed his plaid shirt and the t-shirt below it to inspect the wound. Derek was gratified to see it wasn’t as deep as he’d feared. “Dude!” Stiles said, voice only a little shaky as Scott tore a strip from the plaid shirt and fastened it into a makeshift bandage. “You threaten me all the time!”

Derek rolled his eyes. “I’m the alpha.”

Then Derek’s words seemed to catch up to him, and his mouth dropped open. “Wait a second. I’m in your pack?”

“No!” Scott said. 

Derek froze, for the first time realizing what he’d implied. _Protect your human packmates_ had been one of the first rules drilled into him in childhood. When Jackson attacked Stiles, Derek had acted without thinking. Stiles was biting his lip, watching Derek. He was gripping his t-shirt in one slender hand, tight enough that his knuckles stood out white against the blood-soaked cotton. Those same hands had shaken when they lifted the bone saw from the table, but steadied when they held it to Derek’s arm. They’d caught Derek when he lay drowning at the bottom of the pool, and pulled him up to the surface. 

Fighting to keep his face impassive, Derek snapped, “Don’t be an idiot!”

Stiles blinked slowly, as though taking a second to process Derek’s words. For a second, Derek feared he’d have to spell it out for him. Then a smile broke through the pain and exhaustion on his face. 

“Yes!” he crowed, pumping his fist, and then immediately yelped in pain as the motion tugged at his wounded shoulder. Even so, he grinned, shuffling excitedly on his feet. “I’m one of the Avengers!” 

Derek rolled his eyes.

Scott was looking at him plaintively. “You don’t need a pack, Stiles! Neither of us do!”

Ignoring him, Stiles bounced across the room to pick up Derek’s agenda, from where it had landed on the floor. “Listen,” he said, glancing from Scott to Derek. “Both of you. I just had an idea. Derek is basically Batman, right?”

“You said I was Batman!” Scott protested.

Stiles waved a hand. “That was when you were still being all reluctant wolf. With this noble kick you’ve been on lately, you downgraded yourself to Superman.” He frowned, tapping his lip. “Or maybe Captain America, what with the sudden super powers. But that’s mixing universes. Anyway, what do Batman and Superman have in common?”

Scott was staring at him. “They both wear tights?”

Behind them, Lydia gave an exasperated noise. “They’re in the Justice League of America,” she snapped. “Stiles wants the two of you to form an alliance.”

Stiles stared at her. “You read comics?” he asked. “Because that might actually make you too perfect. Really, I’m not sure that much awesome should even exist.”

Lydia rolled her eyes. “No,” she said. “Obviously.” For a moment, confusion clouded her expression, but then she shook her head, sliding her superior smirk back into place. “I must have seen it somewhere.”

Boyd snorted. “A second ago, you said we were the Avengers. You’ve got to keep your comics straight, man.”

“I told you yesterday,” Derek said, trying to make his voice convey exactly how much of an idiot Stiles was. “We’re not superheroes.”

“No!” Stiles said, “just hear me out!” He turned to Scott. “You don’t want to be in the pack. But you’ve got to admit that it’s stupid for you to face the new alphas on your own. Come on, you saw what they did to Erica and Boyd.”

Scott glowered, but Stiles’s words had obviously hit home. 

Stiles looked at Derek. “And really, all you need is for everyone to have your back when the alpha pack comes back, right?”

Derek nodded reluctantly.

“So there you go,” Stiles said. “Come together to face the forces of evil. Afterwards, you can go back to lurking around the mean streets of Beacon Hills, and Scott can focus on being a teenager again.”

As much as he hated to admit it, the idea did make a certain amount of sense.

Scott was watching Derek warily. After a second, he said, “Would you be okay working with me, even if I refused to join your pack?”

“It’s not my first choice,” Derek said. “But neither of us is strong enough to face them on our own. Stiles is right about that.”

“Fine,” Scott said, crossing his arms.

Derek gave a sharp nod, then turned to Jackson. “And you?”

Jackson glared up at him. His eyes were still wide with fear. To Derek’s surprise, Lydia stepped forward, resting her hand on Jackson’s shoulder and giving Derek a practiced smile.

“He’s in,” she said sweetly.

Derek looked around the room. Stiles was pulling on his t-shirt with clumsy, stilted motions as he tried not to jar his injured shoulder. Jackson was glaring at Lydia, who just patted his shoulder. Boyd and Erica still looked like a good swipe might knock both of them over, and Isaac had slumped back into his chair, visibly relieved. Scott stood with his hands in his pockets, sullen, still watching Derek with a challenge in his eyes. In the back of the room, Peter stood, watching them all with a faintly hungry expression, like a vulture. It wasn’t a proper pack. It wasn’t even close. But it would have to do until the blood moon.

**To be continued . . .**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're the kind of person who likes seeing updates about the writing process, I occasionally post snippets and notes on Tumblr. I'm Piscaria there as well, if you care to follow me.
> 
> Thank you for reading! Feedback and constructive criticism are always appreciated.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long break between updates, everyone! The thread I'd been following through the maze of this story got lost somehow, and it took some time for me to find it again. 
> 
> As always, thanks to Drew and Jsea for beta'ing.

Temptation grew too great in the grocery store line, and Stiles reached for his phone, wondering if Scott had come to his senses yet. They hadn’t spoken or texted since the meeting at Derek’s place last week. He and Scott had argued before, even stopped speaking to each other once or twice, but usually one of them caved within a few days. Stiles glanced at the phone, trying not to get his hopes up. Still, his heart sank when he saw no new messages or missed calls. Sighing, Stiles peered around the stocky man in front of him to see what was holding up the line. Some lady was arguing with the cashier about an expired coupon. Stiles rolled his eyes, and glanced back at the phone. Fuck it, he decided. Let it never be said that Stiles Stilinski couldn’t be the bigger man.

Carefully shifting his bouquet of white roses to the crook of his elbow, Stiles opened a new text to Scott. His thumbs hesitated over the keys. What was he supposed to say? He felt awful about getting Scott bitten, he really did. He’d already apologized. But Stiles _wasn’t_ sorry for the rest of their argument. Scott should have told him Isaac when moved in. And, okay, Stiles had joined Derek’s pack mostly to piss off Scott. But after all their mutual life-saving, Stiles thought he was probably half in the pack anyway. Pack Lite, maybe. Why not make it official? It wasn’t like Scott had consulted Stiles before spending all his time with Isaac.

Deciding to skip the apologies, Stiles finally settled on, **Hey, man.** Once he hit send, his chest felt a thousand times lighter. Whatever happened next, at least the waiting was over. _Your move, McCall,_ he thought.

Stiles leaned against the display of magazines and waited for an answer. And waited. And waited. He waited until the coupon lady threw down the advertisement in a huff and stormed out, until the line started moving and he finally reached the front. Only when he was stepping out of the blissfully air-conditioned store and into the sweltering parking lot did Stiles admit he’d probably have to keep waiting.

The Jeep’s door handle burned his fingers, and Stiles hissed, shaking his hand in a vain attempt to cool the sting. The wave of heat that billowed from the Jeep’s interior smelled faintly like blood and disinfectant, despite the bottle of Febreeze he now kept behind the driver’s seat. Stiles cranked down the windows, wishing the Jeep had air conditioning. The roses were probably already starting to wilt.

His phone vibrated, and Stiles grinned, careful not to bump his bare knees against the hot steering wheel as he dug it out of the pocket of his shorts. His happiness lasted until he saw Derek’s name in the text window, not Scott’s. As always, Derek’s message was succinct and to the point.

**Training tomorrow. 8 am. Be there.**

Rolling his eyes, Stiles typed, **What if I have plans?**

Derek’s reply came almost instantaneously.

**You don’t.**

Stiles would have been offended if it weren’t true. Dropping the phone on the passenger seat beside the roses, Stiles gingerly grasped the hot steering wheel and backed out of his parking space.

The one good thing about the cemetery was that it was well shaded. Stiles parked the Jeep beneath a willow tree, and followed the winding path through the grass, until he came to a wide, granite grave marker. One side read, _Antonia Stilinski. 1972-2001. Beloved wife and mother._ A gold-etched heart separated it from the other side of the marker, which was still empty. Stiles dreaded the day he’d see his dad’s name written there.

Another bouquet of roses, red ones, already lay atop the grave. Dad must have visited during his lunch break. Stiles imagined him kneeling here in his sheriff’s uniform, murmuring a few words to the grave marker before standing, brushing the grass off his knees, and climbing back into the patrol car. A lump rose in Stiles’s throat, and he carefully nestled his white roses in beside his dad’s red ones. With the tips of his fingers, he traced the letters of his mother’s name. Stiles never talked to the grave. Not like his dad did. At her funeral, Stiles had stepped up on tiptoes to peer into his mother’s casket. He’d known then, with absolute certainty, that nothing of his mother remained in the body they were about to bury. Still, if she were watching from somewhere, Stiles wanted her to know he remembered her. Stretching out on his back, he folded his arms behind his head, the marble cool against his sweaty skin. For a long time, he just lay there, gazing up at the cloudless sky. Then he caught sight of a slim figure in black lingering beside another cluster of graves.

Stiles sat up so quickly he almost knocked down the roses. The figure had frozen, staring at him. Hesitantly, Stiles lifted his hand in a wave. After a second, Allison brushed her long hair away from her face, and waved back.

* * *

They sat together on a stone bench beneath the branches of a wide oak. Not far away, a stone angel poured water from one pitcher to another. The second pitcher overflowed steadily downward, into a wide stone basin. For a few minutes, they watched the fountain in silence. Allison drew her knees up to her chest, hugging them. She’d been crying, and the dark smear of her smudged make-up stood out in sharp contrast to her pale skin.

“How’s Scott?” Allison finally asked in a small voice.

Stiles bit down on his lip to keep from blurting out that he and Scott hadn’t spoken in over a week. “Scott . . . Scott’s fine.” He nodded to emphasize his point. From Allison’s expression, he might have overdone it. Stiles sucked at lying, which was ironic, considering how often he had to do it these days. “He misses you,” Stiles added, and this time, his voice sounded better, more serious, probably because it was true.

Allison smiled shakily. “I’m not ready to see him yet,” she said. “But tell him . . . Tell him I miss him, too.”

“I will,” Stiles promised.

Requisite Scott conversation finished, silence settled over them again, filled only by the steady gurgle of water from the fountain. Stiles realized that, though he knew a ridiculous amount about Allison — she always ordered caramel lattes, she’d lived in 17 states, she liked to be on top (thanks, Scott) — he didn’t actually know _her_ very well at all. The only time they’d spent together without Scott as a buffer was when Stiles had been passing messages between them. Stiles had no idea how to talk to her now. Did he treat her like his best friend’s ex, or like the girl whose grandpa had beaten him to a pulp?

When the silence grew too long and awkward, Stiles blurted out, “Do you come here a lot?” He winced as soon as the words left his mouth, but Allison let out a startled, watery laugh.

“No,” she said, dabbing her eyes with her sleeve. “Not really. Do you?”

“Nah,” he said, and gestured back towards his mom’s grave. “It’s her birthday today. Well, it would’ve been. If she . . . You know.”

“Mom wanted to talk to me,” Allison choked out. “Before she —“ Shuddering, she hugged herself tighter, resting her cheek on her pale, pointed knees. Stiles stared out at the fountain, remembering those first, hellish months after his own mom had died. “I blew her off to go to Lydia’s party,” Allison whispered. “Now I keep wondering if I could have talked her out of it. Why didn’t I just listen to her?”

“You can’t blame yourself,” Stiles said, restlessly tapping the back of the stone bench. “Once you do, it starts eating away at you from the inside, until you’re totally hollow, and all that’s left is anger and guilt.”

Allison was staring at him. Stiles glanced away, chewing at his bottom lip.

“She would have handled this so much better than me,” Allison whispered.

“Handled what?” 

Allison hesitated, shifting nervously on the bench. “We found Grandpa today.”

“Oh shit!” Stiles said. With the alpha pack’s deadline, he’d completely forgotten about Gerard’s missing body. “Is he . . .?”

Allison’s body tensed on the bench beside Stiles. When she spoke, her voice held a hard, steely note he’d never heard from her before. “We took care of it.” She looked out at the rows of graves, eyes bright, but jaw firm. After a second, her shoulders softened, and she sighed. “At least all this supernatural shit is over now.”

Stiles opened his mouth, then closed it, face stretching into a grimace. Allison stared at him.

“What?”

“Have you ever heard of the alpha pack?” Stiles asked. At her blank look, he started to explain. She winced when he mentioned Erica and Boyd, but otherwise listened impassively, her dark eyes impossible to read. When Stiles’s voice drifted into silence, she shook her head.

“Part of me wants to just stay out of it.”

Stiles laughed bitterly, scrubbing his face with his palms. “Believe me, I know.”

Allison shot to her feet, pacing from the bench to the fountain. “I know Derek didn’t mean to kill my mom. But part of me is still so happy that someone out there wants to take him down.”

“Derek didn’t kill your mom.” 

Glaring at him, Allison snapped, “I know that!” She restlessly danced her fingers over the water’s surface. “He was trying to protect Scott,” she said, sounding like she was still trying to convince herself. “And Mom . . . “ For a second, pure fury crossed Allison’s face, and she slammed her fist down into the water. A fine spray rose up, drenching the front of her black blouse. Allison stared down at it, horrified, holding the wet fabric away from her skin.

Stiles swallowed. “My mom had cancer.” 

Allison looked at him sharply.

“She got it when I was eight.” Stiles stood, crossing to stand beside Allison. “She went into remission after a year. I thought she was cured. I think we all did. And then . . . “ He shook his head, holding out his hands, helplessly. “Afterwards, I was so mad at her for getting sick again, and then for dying. I never told anyone. I tried not to show it. It felt like such a betrayal, you know? She was dead. What right did I have to get mad at her, especially over something she couldn’t control?” He stared down at his reflection, the lines of his face wavering from the steady fall of water. “But when you love someone, you should be angry when they’re gone. Because they left you. Even if they didn’t mean to, they left.”

“Mom meant to leave,” Allison said in a small voice.

Stiles nodded, slumping over the fountain with his elbows braced on the rim of the basin, his hands clasped in front of him. A handful of pennies dotted the bottom of the basin, but not nearly as many as he might expect. He supposed there wasn’t really a point to making wishes in a cemetery. The wishing always happened before. Once someone was in the ground, it was already too late.

After a second, Allison leaned in beside him. Her thick hair fell over her face like a curtain, the tips of her long curls just brushed the rippling water below. She stood close enough that Stiles could feel tiny shudders racking her body, but he didn’t offer comfort, and she didn’t ask for any.

Finally she sighed. “Mom always said you had to be ready to make the hard decisions. That’s why she . . .” Allison bit her lip, her face crumpling for a second. Then lifted her chin, and brushed her hair away from her face. “But dying is easy. Anyone can do it. It’s harder to live with the consequences of what you’ve done.”

“Allison?”

She gave him a tight smile. “When the alphas come, call me,” she said. “Dad and I will help. We owe you guys that much.” Spinning on her heels, she strode off down the path towards the parking lot.

Stiles watched her disappear around the bend, then reached for his phone.

 **Ran into Allison** he typed to Scott.

He tried not to feel insulted when Scott’s reply came immediately. **What? Really? What did she say???** Stiles shook his head, torn between fondness and outrage. At least some things could be counted on to stay the same.

* * *

Derek heard his uncle’s footsteps an instant before he smelled him. Peter had taken to wearing cologne, but even the chemical musk of it couldn’t entirely cover the deeper, unnerving scent of magic and burned mausoleums. Derek’s fingers spasmed around the door frame he was using as a chin-up bar, and the charred wood cracked threateningly. But it held strong as Derek pulled himself up, held for a minute, then lowered himself back down.

“I must say, you put more effort into maintaining your figure than my wife ever did,” Peter said from behind him.

Derek’s teeth ground together, but he didn’t respond to the bait. Working out helped to ease the constant buzz of fear and anger in his mind. That buzz had grown a lot louder since Peter came back from the dead. Ignoring Peter, Derek finished his set of pull-ups, then dropped smoothly into a crouch. Flattening his hands against the floor, he kicked his feet out behind him, holding himself in plank position for a moment before beginning his first set of push-ups. From the corner of his eye, he watched Peter step into the room and lower himself to sit against the wall. His hands were blistered, blackened from fire, and the skin around his face had started peeling away, showing the white curve of a cheekbone beneath.

Panic had Derek leaping backward, claws and fangs lengthening out of reflex. His muscles tensing to pounce, Derek lifted his head to growl at Peter — and froze at the sight of his uncle’s healthy, unscarred skin.

“Is something wrong?” Peter asked, the same fond, half-smile quirking his lips that he’d always worn when Derek did something to amuse him as a child.

Derek swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry. The hair on his arms was standing straight up. “I thought I saw something.”

“Oh?” Peter clasped his hands behind his head, arching his back against the wall. Derek tried not to wince at the wet pop of muscle. “What did you see?”

“I don’t know,” Derek admitted. Taking a deep breath, he forced his heartbeat to steady, wrestling the wolf back into submission.

“There’s so much you don’t know, Derek,” Peter sighed. The concern in his voice actually sounded genuine. “Yet when I offer my expertise, you turn a deaf ear.”

Derek felt his eyebrows lifting. “You lured Laura here and killed her,” he said. “You tried to kill me. You bit Scott without his permission, killed three humans, nearly drove Lydia insane, and then drained my power to rise out of your grave. Why should I listen to you?”

Peter sighed, heavily. “I was out of my mind before, Derek. You remember when Jackson paralyzed you. How helpless you felt? Imagine feeling that way for six years, unable to move, unable to speak, hearing the world move on without you. Hearing the only family you had left plan to abandon you, to move across the country?”

Despite himself, Derek winced, and Peter nodded, eyes bright with satisfaction.

“I think some part of me grew to hate you and Laura,” Peter said thoughtfully. “Because the two of you didn’t have to live through that inferno, to hear the people you loved screaming, to watch them throw themselves against the walls, tear their claws off trying to escape the flames, to smell their flesh cooking. You never choked on smoke or felt the fire licking your skin. The two of you thought you lost everything, but you didn’t. You had your strength and you had each other. You were a pack. And I . . .” Peter looked down at his hands, but his eyes looked distant. “I was a wounded omega, trapped inside my own, broken body.”

Derek stared hard at the opposite wall.

Peter knelt beside him, his eyes focused on Derek’s face. Derek felt stripped bare, suddenly, like Peter could see all the way down to his soul. “You were a child,” Peter said sadly, and Derek froze. Peter shook his head. “At least, that’s what I told myself. You were barely sixteen. You didn’t realize there would be consequences for your negligence.”

Derek’s heart hammered in his throat. His stomach heaved. Was Peter still talking about Derek and Laura leaving Beacon Hills, he wondered, or was he talking about . . . Derek wrapped his arms around his chest, clamping down on the instincts to lash out, to escape, to run. Peter’s hand settled on his shoulder, and Derek flinched, but didn’t throw him off.

“I’m trying to forgive you, Derek,” Peter said, voice low and plaintive. “Can’t you do the same for me?”

Derek swallowed, glaring at the ground. He couldn’t bring himself to answer, and Peter didn’t seem to expect him to. Instead, he wrapped his arm around Derek’s shoulders, briefly. Derek’s skin crawled at the contact, but he couldn’t pull away, and Peter seemed to know that.

“We’re kin, you and I,” he said, squeezing Derek closer for a second, before releasing him. “And neither of us can afford to be picky about the little family we have left.” Giving Derek one last pat on the shoulder, Peter pushed up to his feet, and strode out of the room.

When Derek erupted out of the house a few minutes later, he tried to tell himself it was only because he’d planned a long run as part of his workout.

To be continued . . .


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks always to Drew for his fast and thorough beta work. <3 Any remaining mistakes are my own.

The pale pink rays of dawn were just beginning to lighten the edges of the sky when a wind blew up from the direction of the house. Derek was running the perimeter of the property. He liked to do it early, before the oppressive summer heat turned it into a chore. But something in the wind made him pause.

Over the familiar scents of old death and stale ash, it carried a brighter note, so unexpected it took Derek a second to place it. Chocolate, he realized, drawing the scent in deeply. His mom used to brag she made the best devil’s food cake in Beacon Hills. The memory came back so strongly Derek could almost see it — her green apron, dusted with flour and cocoa powder, her smile as she reached up to ruffle his hair, handing him a beater to lick as though he were five and not fifteen. A week later, Kate had laughed as he led her up the stairs to his bedroom, already stripping off the old, maroon t-shirt he’d given her. Derek had worn it three days straight beforehand, running in it, sleeping in it, even jerking off in it, letting his sweat soak into every fiber so the smells of wolf and pack and teenage boy would mask Kate’s weaker, human scent. He’d found a scrap of that shirt in the ashes. Even beneath the reek of kerosene, wolfsbane, mountain ash, and death, it had still smelled mostly of Derek.

Rage coursed through him, red hot and impotent. He’d been running like a human, but on his next stride, he let himself fall forward, catching his weight on the heels of his palms before launching himself forward. On all fours, he tore through the forest until his breath burned his lungs, and he thought his heart might pound itself free of his chest. He was drenched in sweat by the time he’d completed three full circuits of the property and the nature preserve, and the sky overhead was blue. Only when he drew within sight of the house did he let himself slow, limbs trembling from exhaustion. He’d planned to head straight to Laura’s room and grab some fresh clothes, carry them down to the creek to wash off a bit before everyone arrived for training. But a sudden peal of laughter from the kitchen caught his attention.

Quietly, Derek circled around to the back, where a broken window gave a clear view into the kitchen. Erica was leaning on her elbows against the sink, giggling, while Boyd nibbled a trail up the side of her neck from behind, one hand curled against her belly, the other buried in her hair. They were both soaked through with sudsy water, and a smear of chocolate darkened Erica’s cheekbone. She squealed when Boyd leaned in to lick it off. Derek stepped quickly out of the tree line before the moment could grow any more intimate.

Boyd caught sight of him immediately, his head stilling against Erica’s neck. He slowly drew away from her. Erica pouted prettily, until she, too, noticed Derek standing in the yard. Derek returned Boyd’s nod, but not Erica’s smile.

“Hey, man,” Boyd said as Derek let himself in the back door. Erica waved, ducking her head instinctively. Neither of them met Derek’s eyes. They hadn’t since he’d claimed them in front of the alpha pack. Their deference pleased his wolf, but unsettled the human part of him. Despite what Peter said, Derek hadn’t bitten them only because they were outcasts and hungry for connection. He’d seen a spark in each of them, Isaac too, that hinted they’d be powerful, if only he could feed it. If there was one thing Derek was good at, he figured it was starting fires. But their brightness had faded since being taken by the alphas. Derek worried it might not rekindle.

“We made funeral cookies,” Erica said. 

“Funeral cookies,” Derek repeated, following her gaze to the marble countertop, sagging beneath the buckled cabinetry, but still intact. On a piece of wax paper, lay dozens of globs of . . . oatmeal and chocolate, Derek decided, after staring at them for a second.

“That’s what my dad always called them,” Erica said with a shrug. “They’re no-bakes. It was the best we could do without an oven.”

“For breakfast?” Derek asked dubiously. He opened the fridge, taking out his tub of plain Greek yogurt.

“For training,” Boyd said. “Everyone liked the cupcakes Lydia brought to the pack meeting.”  
They were watching Derek cautiously as he measured half a cup of yogurt into a bowl, their expressions hopeful, but nervous.

“It’s a good idea,” he said, stifling a smile when they sagged with relief. “Pack should eat together.”

Turning away from their beaming faces, Derek sprinkled his low-fat granola onto the yogurt. He was getting used to the chocolate smell in the kitchen, enough to notice that the scent of dark magic and decay was noticeably lighter.

“Where’s Peter?” he asked.

Erica and Boyd looked at each other significantly. “We’re out of coffee,” Boyd said. “He went to town to pick up more.” The words were matter of fact, but Boyd’s tone was oddly hesitant. Erica elbowed him in the side. Boyd cleared his throat. “We, um, we actually wanted to talk to you about that.”

Derek lifted an eyebrow.

“He’s creepy!” Erica burst out. “You know that broken mirror on the second floor?” At Derek’s nod, she said, “He walked by it last week, and I saw his reflection. Do you know what it looked like?”

“A corpse?” Derek guessed, remembering the rotting flesh he’d seen when he glimpsed Peter through the corner of his eye.

She nodded, eyes wide.

“And he smells wrong,” Boyd added. “You’ve seen the kinds of things that come up to him. Bugs. Worms. The other day, a crow kept circling him. He still smells like death, and I think they’re trying to, I don’t know, scavenge him or something.”

“What am I supposed to do about it?” Derek asked, taking a bite of his yogurt.

“Get rid of him!” Erica said.

Boyd nodded. “Man, I know he’s your uncle, but he’s not right.”

Erica shifted nervously. “We’ve been talking to Isaac. He said you were the one who killed him the first time. That he killed your sister.”

Derek closed his eyes for a second, seeing Laura’s glassy eyes staring up at him from the forests floor. “That’s true,” he acknowledged.

“Then why do you trust him?” Erica asked.

“I don’t trust him,” Derek said, placing his empty bowl in the sink. As she drew herself up to say something, he added, “But I don’t trust the two of you, either.”

They both winced.

Erica bit her lip. “Derek, I know we keep saying we’re sorry, but it’s the truth. We shouldn’t have left.”

“That’s right, you shouldn’t have!” Derek snapped. “Pack sticks together!”

She drew back from the anger in his voice, glancing helplessly back at Boyd.

Boyd sighed. “Look, we fucked up,” he said. “We know that. We’re trying to make it up to you. Look, with Peter . . . We just don’t want to see you get hurt.”

Derek froze, unable to breathe for a second. He tried to keep his voice measured, but it still rumbled a little when he said, “Peter stays.”

“Dude, you’re the alpha,” Boyd said hurriedly, unconsciously baring his throat. “If you say he stays, he says.” He hesitated. “But could you at least tell us why?”

Derek glared through the spiderweb cracks in the window. Outside, the sky was brilliantly blue, but he didn’t really see it. In his mind, he saw Laura’s mutilated body, felt Peter’s hand on his shoulder, heard Kate’s laughter as he led her up the stairs. Sighing, he said, “Because you’re not the only ones who fucked up.”

In the broken window glass, a hundred reflected Ericas and Boyds glanced at each other. All of the Ericas stepped cautiously forward.

“Derek?” she asked.

He glared down at the sink full of soapy water, not wanting to see their faces, even reflected. “Pack sticks together,” he said. “But Laura and I left Peter alone for six years.” It was only a fraction of what Derek had done to Peter, but it was all he could ever bring himself to speak aloud. “Pack means that when someone fucks up, you take them in anyway, even if they don’t deserve it. If Peter isn’t good enough for this pack, none of us are.”

Behind him, the floorboards creaked, and the air shifted against his sweaty back. That was all the warning Derek got before Erica threw her arms around his chest, hugging him tightly from behind. Derek stiffened, remembering how she’d tried to kiss him. But this time, there was nothing sexual about her embrace. She held him like Laura used to, pressing her forehead against his shoulder. A second later, Boyd stepped forward, wrapping his strong arms around them both.

The tightness around Derek’s heart eased slightly. When he closed his eyes and drew in a breath, the scent of pack overwhelmed even the melted chocolate. Against his chest, one of Boyd’s large hands covered both of Erica’s. Cautiously, Derek lifted his own hand, resting it over Boyd’s. They stayed like that, not speaking, until the sound of an engine outside signaled Peter’s return.

Reluctantly, Derek drew away. “Finish cleaning up,” he said. “Everyone will be here in an hour.”

* * *

Stiles pulled up to the Hale house to find Peter and Derek sitting side by side on the sagging front steps, Derek’s head bowed over a notebook while Peter looked on over his shoulder, sipping from a paper Starbucks cup. Derek must have heard the Jeep rumbling down the gravel road, but he didn’t look up as Stiles parked beside the Camaro. Peter only nodded, a smug smile flickering around the corners of his lips. Stiles glared back, stifling the absurd impulse to tug Derek out of Peter’s vicinity. It still unsettled him to see Derek calmly working with Peter like nothing had happened. Behind them, the door opened, and Erica and Boyd stepped out.

Derek stood as Stiles slammed the Jeep’s door shut, crossing the yellow grass to meet him. Tiny puffs of dirt rose up from beneath his bare feet. For the first time, Stiles noticed Derek wasn’t wearing his usual jeans, but a pair of dark yoga pants settled low in his hips. A dark trail of hair traced the sculpted plains of his stomach and disappeared behind the waistband. Stiles’s fingers suddenly itched to follow it, and he batted his hands restlessly against his thighs. He’d chosen his loosest pair of lacrosse shorts for training, thank God, but they didn’t have pockets. What the hell was wrong with him? It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen Derek shirtless before. Maybe it was Derek’s expression. For once, he didn’t look irritated at the sight of Stiles. Without its usual scowl, Derek’s face was disarmingly perfect, all chiseled jaw, artful stubble, and piercing gray-green eyes. Self-consciously, Stiles crossed his arms across his chest, wishing the heat wave hadn’t forced him to abandon his trusty layers. At least Derek seemed oblivious to Stiles’s burgeoning reminder of his (mostly theoretical) bisexuality.

“Here,” he said, shoving the open notebook into Stiles’s hands.

“What’s this?” Stiles asked, fingering the black cover. The notebook was one of those pretentious Moleskine types. Stiles tried to imagine Derek scowling into it at a New York coffeehouse, like the wannabe poets who frequented the cafes downtown.

“It’s a training schedule,” Derek said, sounding a little defensive.

In his neat, square handwriting, Derek had sketched out a weekly calendar. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday had square blocks of time set aside for training. The other days all had “independent practice” written ominously in large, black letters. Stiles didn’t even want to know what Derek’s idea of werewolf homework was.

“We usually all play lacrosse on Saturdays,” Stiles said, flicking his finger against one of Derek’s training blocks. “Well, Scott and I play. Last time Jackson and Isaac joined us.”

Stiles expected an argument, but Derek only shrugged. “So we’ll play lacrosse,” he said. “It will help the betas learn to move as a pack. I need Scott to work on looking more human on the field, anyway.”

“Because _you_ are so great at looking human,” Stiles said, rolling his eyes. “Have you even played lacrosse before?”

Derek scowled at him. “I swam in high school.”

“You were on the swim team?” Stiles asked, and Peter burst out laughing from the porch. Stiles, Erica and Boyd glanced curiously at him. Derek just glared at Peter.

“No,” Derek ground out. “I just swam.”

“Derek has never been much of a joiner,” Peter said, still chuckling.

“Imagine that,” Stiles said, and Derek turned his glare on him. Stiles grinned. “Don’t worry, dude. We’ll teach you the basics of lacrosse. I’m sure you’ll figure it out before too long.” Stiles patted Derek’s shoulder. He immediately wished he hadn’t. Derek’s bare skin was sun-warm, surprisingly soft to the touch. Jerking his hand back, Stiles stepped backwards, out of temptation’s reach, forcing his face into a smile that had to look ridiculous, if Erica and Boyd’s expressions were anything to go by.

Derek was looking at Stiles oddly, and Peter wore a particularly knowing smirk. Fortunately, Isaac and Scott burst out of the woods a second later, drawing everyone’s attention away from Stiles. While Isaac smiled nervously at Derek, and bounded up to greet Erica and Boyd, Scott crossed to stand beside Stiles, shoving his hands in his pockets.

“Hey.”

Stiles licked his lips. “Hey.”

“Are we . . . ?” Scott started, his gaze fixed on the house.

Stiles sighed heavily, bumped his shoulder against Scott’s. “Yeah, man. We’re good.”

* * *

Jackson and Lydia arrived last. Lydia stepped out of the Porsche wearing a short, white skirt, and a floral blouse that bared her midriff. Stiles wondered if she and Derek were trying to kill him. Ignoring how gallantly Stiles was trying not to look at her long legs and bare stomach, Lydia stepped into a bright patch of sunlight, and pointed to it imperiously.

“Here,” she said.

Stiles couldn’t figure out what she was talking about, until Jackson appeared, easily hauling a tall, canvas deck chair on his shoulders. He set it up where Lydia was pointing, and she beamed, stepping onto tiptoes to kiss him. Stiles looked away hurriedly, joining the group of betas that had reluctantly clustered around Derek.

“Everyone pair up!” Derek was saying.

Scott scowled. “Why does he get to give the orders?”

“Because he’s the alpha,” Stiles snapped. When Scott’s frowned just deepened, Stiles sighed. “Dude, come on. You’ve got admit he knows more about this stuff than you do. What’s the worst that can happen if you pick up a few tips?”

Scott wrinkled his nose, but didn’t have a counter argument. Still scowling, he moved to stand by Isaac. Not surprisingly, Erica and Boyd had chosen each other. Jackson hesitated a second, glancing from Peter, still sitting on the porch with his iced tea, to Derek. Making a face, he stepped deliberately to the side, alone. If Stiles had tried a move like that, he’d have looked like the biggest loser on the planet. Jackson managed to look like he was doing everyone a favor by gracing them with his presence at all.

“No,” Derek said after a studying them for a second. “This won’t work. New plan. Scott, you’re with Boyd. Erica, with Jackson. Isaac . . .” Derek hesitated for a second, and Stiles wondered who the poor guy was going to get stuck with, Peter or Derek. “With Stiles,” Derek finished decisively.

Stiles’s jaw dropped. “What?” 

Derek lifted an eyebrow at him. “You’re pack, aren’t you?”

“Well, yeah, but—“

“Then you’re going to train,” Derek said firmly, steamrolling over Stiles’s protests. “Isaac is going to attack you. Your job is to get away,” he gave Stiles a firm look. “When a fight breaks out around you, your _only_ job is to escape, got that? Don’t get yourself killed trying to be a hero.” Stiles nodded sullenly, and Derek clapped Isaac on the shoulder. “Go easy on him,” he said. “But not too easy. He needs to know what he’s getting himself into.”

“Yeah, because I totally didn’t with Scott trying to kill me, and Peter trying to bite me, and Gerard beating the crap out of me,” Stiles snapped.

Derek’s face darkened, but he didn’t rise to the bait. 

Isaac grinned at Stiles through a mouth of fangs, and Stiles’s blood ran cold. “Shit,” he muttered, and ran.

* * *

Derek watched the betas sparring, wondering how they’d ever be ready to fight the alpha pack in October. Scott and Boyd seemed evenly matched, Scott’s speed nicely countering Boyd’s strength, but Derek knew he could bring the two of them down without even breaking a sweat. On the opposite side of the clearing, Jackson was eyeing Erica dubiously, clearly hesitant about attacking a girl. She bared her fangs at him, and pounced, easily knocking him to the ground. Swearing, he picked himself up, starting towards her with actual intent this time.

A strangled yelp caught Derek’s attention, and he turned to see Stiles racing through the trees, Isaac fast on his heels, but obviously holding back. Stiles ran like he’d fallen, but forgotten to hit the ground, all frantic arms and pinwheeling knees, and wide, startled eyes. His cheeks were stained red with exertion. Even from this distance, Derek could easily hear the labored puff of his breath.

“What the hell, man!” Stiles gasped. “You bit me!”

Isaac snorted. “Whatever. I didn’t even use my fangs. Besides, you’re running faster now, aren’t you?”

“I hate you,” Stiles panted. “You and your alpha.”

“Your alpha, too,” Isaac pointed out, and the smile Derek had been stifling forced past his guard when Stiles didn’t try to deny it. For the fist time, he let himself linger on the fact that Stiles had chosen to join his pack, without the bite to bind him there, without even Scott to draw him in. Derek was his alpha. He was Derek’s.  
Stiles broke free of the trees at a dead run, glancing frantically across the field before his eyes locked with Derek’s. Without warning, Stiles changed direction, barreling straight towards him like they were playing an absurd game of chicken. Derek only crossed his arms across his chest, watching him run. Absurdly, he found himself focusing on the lithe muscles of Stiles’s calves. He’d seen Stiles in shorts before while skulking in the stands at lacrosse practice or during a game, but never from this close. The morning sun gilded the fine brown hair on his legs. His shorts were bunching up as he ran, exposing a hand’s width of pale inner thigh. Derek swallowed, jerking his gaze back up to Stiles’s face. The kid was close now, less than ten feet away. He gave Derek a strained grin, then, with less than three feet to spare, launched himself through the air towards Derek. 

It would have been easy to step aside and let Stiles fall on his ass, but that felt too much like giving in. Instead, he caught Stiles by the elbows, as he’d no doubt planned, setting him easily at his feet. For a second, Stiles’s sweaty hands scrabbled at his biceps, then Stiles was ducking behind him, fingers clinging to his shoulders. His labored breath was loud in Derek’s ear.

“What the hell, Stiles?” Derek asked, turning to glare at him. Isaac had drawn to a stop a few feet away, watching Stiles hesitantly.

“You told me to get away,” Stiles gasped. “That’s what I’m doing. I found something bigger and scarier to hide behind.” 

Derek snorted, and shook Stiles off him, dumping the kid backwards onto the grass. Stiles rolled onto his back in a dramatic sprawl of arms and legs. 

Rolling his eyes, Derek said, “Isaac, sneak up into the trees and drop down on Scott. He’s handling Boyd on his own, but I want to see how he does two against one.” Isaac nodded, bounding back into the forest. Derek nudged Stiles with his foot. “Congratulations,” he said. “You got my attention. I’ll give you a head start.”

Stiles blinked up at him, frowning.

“Ten,” Derek started, letting his eyes glow red.

Stiles groaned, hauling himself slowly up to his feet. “Come on, Derek, I’ve been running my ass off. Literally. I will have no ass if you keep this up.”

“Nine,” Derek continued. “Eight.”

Giving him a wounded look, Stiles fled into the woods.

* * *

An hour later, it was a bruised and exhausted Stiles who collapsed on the ground next to Lydia’s deck chair. “Kill me,” he groaned. “Make it fast. I’m not cut out for this crap.”

“No,” Lydia said, without looking up from her phone. She’d spoken the words easily, with the same kind of airy detachment she always used at school, but Stiles detected a faint note of sadness beneath it. He sat up on his elbows, watching Lydia. She pretended not to notice his scrutiny.

“No?” Stiles repeated.

Lydia looked up at him over the rims of her sunglasses. “You are cut out for it,” she said. “You’re more cut out for it than any of them,” she waved a hand at Erica, Boyd, and Isaac, who were now trying to take down Derek as a group, and failing miserably. “You’re more cut out for it than Jackson.” In a smaller voice, she said, “You’re more cut out for it than I am.”

“Lydia,” Stiles said, wanting to touch her somehow, to comfort her, but unsure what to do. She shook her head and drew in a deep breath. Stiles watched, fascinated, as she smoothed on the faintly bored expression she always wore at school.

“I just want things to go back to normal,” she said, then glared down at her phone, as though Stiles weren’t sitting right there. That kind of dismissal would have worked before she’d come to his house after Jackson died. This time, Stiles wasn’t having it. 

“No,” he said. “I don’t think you do.” 

She smiled witheringly. “You don’t know what I want, Stiles.”

“No,” Stiles agreed. “But I know you.” He snatched the phone from her hand, not at all surprised to find it open to a wikipedia article about wolfsbane. “Normal, huh?” he asked, tossing it back to her.

“Shut up,” she muttered, crossing her arms across her chest.

Stiles held his ground. “Look,” he said. “We both know that if you really wanted things to be normal, you wouldn’t be here. You came for the same reason I did.”

“Because we’re the only ones wearing shirts?” she asked, giving him an arch look. 

The sudden heat suffusing his skin surprised him, and he glanced unconsciously to where Derek, Boyd, and Jackson were rolling on the ground in a shameless display of muscles and bare skin.

“Interesting,” Lydia said, tapping her lips.

Stiles gave her a sharp look. “What?”

“That’s just not where I expected you to look,” she said, and Stiles followed her gaze to where Erica was somersaulting down from a tree, dressed only in a pair of cut-off sweats and a sports bra.

“Shit,” Stiles floundered, hands and mind flailing, then pressed his face to his hands. It was easier when he didn’t have to look at Lydia. “Look, I’m not gay, I just —“

“Bisexual,” Lydia said. “That’s the word you’re looking for.”

“I . . . yeah,” Stiles said, cheeks flaming. In all of the ways he thought he might someday come out, this had never even crossed his mind.

Lydia patted him on the shoulder. “It’s okay,” she said. “He likes you, too.”

Stiles stared at her. “What?”

“Derek,” she said. “He likes you, too.”

Stiles shook his head fervently. “No!” he said. “No, no, no! Look, I don’t know where you got that idea, I mean yeah, he’s hot, but I don’t — he doesn’t—“

Lydia smiled at him, not the superior smirk she always wore at school, but a smaller, genuine small. “It’s okay,” she said, petting Stiles’s head like he were some kind of lap dog. “When he’s around, you feel stronger. Braver. Dependable. You don’t always like him, but you like the parts of yourself that he brings out, and the more you get to know him, the more you realize he’s somebody you could want to be around forever.” Her voice had gone distant and dreamy. A chill travelled down Stile’s spine. He had a feeling that if he waved a hand in front of her face right now, she wouldn’t even blink. “And out of everyone here, you’re the only one he trusts, even a little,” Lydia continued. “He cares about you, and it scares him, because he’s lost everyone he’s ever cared.”

“Lydia!” Stiles snapped, and she blinked, shaking herself. “What was that?” he asked, heart beating wildly. He cast a quick glance at the werewolves to see if any of them had overheard, but they were all still focused on training.

She bit her lip. “I don’t know. It was . . . It was stupid. I’ve watched too many romances.” She touched a hand to her forehead, like it hurt. Forcing a smile, she said, “I guess I went a little overboard.”

“A little?” Stiles squeaked. He felt violated, like she’d not only walked into his room while he was jacking off, but lingered to pick through his fantasies, one by one. He wanted a shower, and maybe a drink. “Lydia, that’s . . .” he trailed off, frowning. “How long have you been able to do that?”

Her hand suddenly closed around his arm. “Please,” she said. “Don’t tell anyone. I’m trying to figure this out on my own. The last thing I need is for everyone to start thinking I’m some kind of freak.”

“Have you noticed all the fangs and the glowing eyes?” Stiles said. “Lydia, nobody’s going to think that.”

“Please!” she begged. “Stiles, if you ever cared about me even a little, then keep quiet!”

The seconds stretched by between them. Her eyes were wide, pleading. Stiles sighed. “Fine,” he said. “I won’t tell everyone. But that’s too big to try to figure out by yourself. I’m going to help you.”

Lydia bit her lip. “Really?” she whispered.

Stiles nodded, then jumped to his feet, suddenly needing to move. “Here,” he said. “I want to teach you something.”

Looking just as eager to change the topic as he, Lydia followed him to the Jeep. She frowned at the gallon-sized Ziplock bag of mountain ash Stiles pulled from the glove box.

“Not impressed,” she said.

“Not yet,” Stiles said. “But you will be.” 

He led her a few feet away, to a clear spot beneath an immense oak tree. Reaching into the bag, he scooped up a handful of mountain ash. It ran through his fingers like sand through an hourglass, falling in a thin stream to the ground below. Arm outstretched, he drew a rough circle around them. 

“Hey, Scott!” he called. “Come over here for a second.”

Breaking away from the rest of the betas, Scott obediently trotted over. As he approached, though, he began to slow, until a frown creased his lips.

“Stiles?” he asked, stopping uncertainly at the edge of the circle. He looked at the ground, then at the baggie in Stiles’s hand, and understanding flicked across his features. “What’s with the mountain ash?”

“I’m just showing Lydia,” Stiles said, and launched into an explanation of how the mountain ash worked. She listened, frowning, tapping a finger against her lips, the same way she did in class when a teacher covered a new concept. When Stiles finished, she tossed her hair, and called Jackson over. He rolled his eyes at the summons, but came nonetheless. Lydia held her hands out to Jackson, and Stiles tried to keep his face from falling at the easy familiarity of the gesture.

Jackson stepped forward to take them, then froze, his eyes widening.

“What’s the matter?” Lydia asked.

Shaking his head, Jackson visibly steeled himself and tried again. From this distance, Stiles could see the sweat beading along his temples. “I can’t . . .” He started. “What the?”

“It does work!” Lydia said, sounding surprised.

“I told you!” Stiles said, mildly offended. Bouncing on his toes, he said, “This stuff levels the playing field like you wouldn’t believe. As long as you’re standing in a circle of this stuff, a werewolf wouldn’t be able to touch you! It’s awesome! It’s —” A shadow fell over his head, and he fell silent. Glancing up, he saw Derek balanced in the branches overhead.

“Oh my God!” Stiles gasped, tensing his muscles to sprint.

Before Stiles could take a single step, Derek shifted to a one-handed grip on the branch he perched on, and let himself tip sideways off it in a move that — if the world were anything close to fair — should have landed him flat on his ass. Instead, he hung neatly suspended from one hand, a bare foot braced against the tree trunk for balance. Stiles’s heart stopped as Derek actually grinned at him. Hanging upside down like that, with his eyes glowing red, that grin was one of the creepiest sights Stiles had ever seen, and that was saying something. Then Derek’s hand clenched in the collar of his shirt, and Stiles was being propelled up and out of the circle, legs cycling uselessly in mid-air.

He landed with an “oof” in the grass a few feet away, but gently enough that he knew Derek hadn’t put a whole lot of effort into throwing him. Show off that he was, Derek fucking somersaulted off the tree, landing neatly on his feet while Stiles was still clambering up to his knees.

“What the hell?” Stiles asked, glaring up at him.

That creepy grin had faded, but Derek’s expression still bordered somewhere between amused and smug. “A werewolf can’t cross a line of mountain ash,” he corrected Stiles. “That doesn’t necessarily mean one can’t touch you.”

“Noted,” Stiles grumbled, and reluctantly took the hand Derek offered him up. As massive as Derek seemed sometimes, their hands were about the same size. Their palms matched neatly together, though Derek’s was fever-hot, and with no calluses due to his werewolf healing. Stiles caught Lydia watching them with a cool, calculating expression, and let go of Derek’s hand hurriedly, wiping his palm on his shorts.

“Teach me how,” Lydia demanded.

Stiles grinned at her. “Absolutely!”

 

To be continued . . .

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and constructive criticism are always welcome. And if you want to say hi, feel free to add me on [Tumblr](http://piscaria.tumblr.com/), [Dreamwidth](http://piscaria.dreamwidth.com), or [Livejournal](http://piscaria.livejournal.com) \-- I always look forward to meeting more Teen Wolf fans. Thanks for reading!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long delay! As always, thanks to Smallbear for glancing over this for me. <3

Stiles stared down at the new academic planner in his lap, wondering where the summer had gone. He felt like only a week or two had passed since they’d all met at Derek’s house and agreed to come together to fight the alpha pack. But the lurid bruises dappling Stiles’s skin told a different story. They ranged from yesterday’s crimson to last month’s tawny yellow, and every shade in between. Training with werewolves three times a week definitely did not agree with his frail, human skin. Stiles had started carrying his fresh clothes into the bathroom with him when he showered to keep his dad from spotting the bruises and having a meltdown. Stiles had started to think of his life as the training montage in a movie, all tearing through the woods with Derek nipping at his heels, brainstorming psychic tests for Lydia, and trying to keep up with the werewolves on the lacrosse field. The new school supplies spread across his mattress didn’t fit anywhere into that picture. 

Carefully packing his backpack was a tradition from his old life, like going out for Chinese food the day before school started. The mantle downstairs had a picture of five-year-old Stiles proudly holding up his fortune while his mom leaned in beside him, beaming at the man behind the camera. In the series of photos that followed, Stiles grew progressively older, up until seventh grade, when the photos abruptly stopped. Neither he nor his father had been able to stomach taking a picture that first year without her, though they carried out the tradition every year. Stiles couldn’t remember a year he’d been less excited for egg rolls or almond chicken — except, maybe, for that first year after his mom had died. It was crazy how preparing to fight the alpha pack had made everything else in Stiles’s life fade to the background. 

Opening the planner in his lap, Stiles flipped through the pages until he came to October. He found the date of the full moon, and marked it with an ominous red X. Frowning, he counted backwards, dread settling low and heavy in his stomach. Forty-five days. How on earth were they supposed to take on the alpha pack by then? It still took all five betas working together to even subdue Derek. 

His dad’s footsteps sounded in the hall outside his room, and Stiles snapped the planner shut, shoving it into his backpack.

“Yeah, Dad, I’m almost ready,” he said absent-mindedly. He looked up, and frowned, taking in his dad’s uniform, the badge gleaming against his chest.

His dad grimaced, holding up his cell phone. “Sorry, son. One of the deputies called in sick.” 

“It’s okay,” Stiles said, forcing a smile so wide it stretched his face. “I know you guys are short-handed.” Not many people were lining up to work at the sheriff’s station after Matt’s attack. 

“We can pick up some take-out and eat it in the cruiser,” his dad offered.

For a second, Stiles was tempted. But he thought of the photo downstairs, and his stomach spasmed. “Nah,” he said, as casually as he could manage. “You shouldn’t eat fried rice, anyway. All that grease is bad for your arteries.” 

“I’m sorry,” his dad said again. “You know I wouldn’t go in if there was any other way.”

Stiles looked up, meeting his dad’s eyes. “It’s okay. It’s not your fault.” His shoulder lifted in a shrug. “Besides, I’m almost seventeen. It’s not like the first day of school is that big of a deal.” He drummed his fingers against the bedspread, glancing down at his new notebook, where he’d already neatly printed the names of each of his courses on the subject dividers. 

His dad followed his gaze, then stepped forward, wrapping Stiles in a sudden hug. For a second, Stiles let himself cling to him, ignoring the pressure of his dad’s arm against one of the freshest bruises on his back. 

“I’ll make it up to you,” his dad promised. Opening his wallet, he pulled out a twenty and handed it to Stiles. “Get yourself a pizza or something tonight. Invite Scott over.”

“I will,” Stiles said, keeping the smile firmly locked in place.

Only when the cruiser’s engine rumbled to life in the driveway, did he let it fade. Stiles looked down at the new pens sticking out of the Batman pencil pouch he’d cherished since sixth grade, and his shoulders slumped. He sent a quick text to Scott, asking if he and Isaac wanted to come over for pizza.

Scott’s reply came a few seconds later. **Sorry can’t. Allison wants to talk to me!!!**

That’s how Stiles found himself in the frozen food aisle of the grocery store, trying to decide what to eat on his solitary last day of freedom. He had just narrowed the choice down to mac and cheese or Hot Pockets when a pair of strong hands closed around his throat from behind. 

The box in Stiles’s hands flew as his training kicked in. He slammed his elbow back into his attacker’s face, hearing the satisfyingly wet crunch of a nose breaking. The hands around his throat loosened just a bit, but it was enough for Stiles to break free, fumbling for the wolfsbane spray Lydia had helped him to concoct last month. Gripping it before him defensively, he spun around to face his attacker.

Derek leaned against the glass freezer case, eyes sparkling with mirth. He’d clapped a hand to his face in a futile attempt to catch the blood streaming from his crooked nose, but it didn’t entirely hide his grin.

A heady blend of relief and outrage flooded Stiles’s veins, and he stumbled forward, throwing a punch that Derek easily diverted, his hand closing around Stiles’s wrist, hot and sticky with blood. 

“I hate you,” Stiles gasped. His heartbeat thundered in his chest. Derek shrugged. 

“Not bad,” he said, ruefully touching his nose. Stiles could already see it straightening out as the bones knitted back together. The blood flow had slowed to a steady drip. “But you should have seen my reflection in the glass.”

“I was focusing!” Stiles protested. “This was an important decision.”

The hot rage suffusing Stiles’s body was fading, replaced by an entirely different sort of warmth pooling low in his gut. Derek’s hand was still wrapped around his wrist, fingers lightly stroking over the pulse point in absent-minded circles. He hoped Derek would attribute his flushed skin and stuttering heartbeat to adrenaline. Stiles tapped the fingers of his trapped hand pointedly against the alpha’s wrist, and Derek started. He dropped Stiles’s wrist like it burned. Making a face, Stiles poked at the bloody bracelet Derek’s fingers had left against his pale wrist. 

“Don’t tell me you’re eating this crap for dinner,” Derek said, bending to retrieve the Stouffers box from the floor. 

“Fine, I won’t tell you,” Stiles said, jerking it out of Derek’s hand and dropping it into the basket with as much dignity as he could manage. He ignored the bloody fingerprints on the orange cardboard. “What are you doing here, anyway? Did you just see my Jeep in the parking lot and decide to torment me?”

Derek rolled his eyes. “This might sound hard to believe,” he said, “but not everything in my life revolves around you.” He glanced pointedly at his own shopping basket, sitting next to his feet. Stiles’s eyebrows lifted as he took in the leafy contents. He’d never given much thought to what Derek Hale might pick up on a grocery run, but he definitely wouldn’t have expected a werewolf to be buying organic kale or kiwi fruit. 

“Healthy,” Stiles commented.

“Some of us know what real food tastes like,” Derek said, but his heart clearly wasn’t in the bickering. He shoved his hands in his pockets, smearing blood on his dark jeans in the process. His gaze flicked uncertainly over Stiles’s shopping basket. 

Someone cleared her throat from the end of the aisle. “Are you boys okay?” a matronly checker asked. She was eyeing Derek’s blood-soaked shirt. “You weren’t fighting, were you?”

“Nose bleed,” Stiles said hurriedly, throwing an arm around Derek’s shoulders. Derek stiffened at the contact, but didn’t pull away. “My cousin here gets them all the time.” He smiled, ignoring Derek’s death glare.

The checker clucked sympathetically as the suspicion in her face gave way to pity. “That’s too bad,” she said. “There’s a bathroom in back. You should get him cleaned up. I’ll call someone to mop up here.”

Boredom led Stiles to follow Derek back to the small grocery store bathroom. Leaning against the wall, he watched as Derek splashed water on his face. When Derek lifted his dripping chin, Stiles handed him a paper towel.

“Thanks,” Derek grunted, mopping at his face. He tried dabbing the wet paper towel at the blood-soaked front of his t-shirt, then sighed, giving it up as a lost effort. Stiles plucked at the hem of Derek’s sleeve, steadfastly ignoring the hard line of bicep beneath it.

“You must buy these things in bulk,” he said.

In the mirror, their eyes met. The open sadness on Derek’s face surprised Stiles. “I do now,” Derek said, and turned, striding out of the bathroom. Stiles hurried after him, wondering about Derek’s previous life in New York. It was hard to imagine Derek not surrounded by violence every day. 

When they collected the shopping baskets they’d left outside the bathroom, Derek frowned at the blood-stained Stouffers box in Stiles’s.

“Sorry,” he said.

Stiles’s eyebrows flew nearly to his hairline. “Did you just apologize for something? Am I dreaming? Did hell freeze over?”

“Shut up,” Derek snapped, running a hand through his hair. The tips of his ears were flushed faintly pink. Stiles stared at them, fascinated. “You should let me make it up to you,” Derek said, lifting his chin under Stiles’s scrutiny.

“What?”

Derek rolled his eyes. “Come eat with us,” he said. It was the same voice he used to bark out orders on the training field, but Stiles could detect the faint questioning note in it.

“Do you even have a kitchen?” Stiles hedged. Part of him wanted to jump on the offer. He hated eating alone. The other half couldn’t believe he was even contemplating eating dinner with Derek and his pack in their burnt-out house.

“We have a grill,” Derek said, a touch defensively. “And a refrigerator. Boyd’s helping me build an oven out back.”

“I don’t know, dude,” Stiles said, rocking awkwardly back onto his heels. “Tomorrow’s the first day of school. I should get ready.”

“For what?” Derek asked. “You don’t have any homework yet.”

“True,” Stiles said. He scratched behind his ear. “I don’t want to impose on you guys.”

“You’re pack,” Derek said, with a note of finality. “Pack should eat together.” He spoke the words like he’d heard them a hundred times, and Stiles couldn’t help wondering if that had been a mantra in Derek’s family, like maybe he’d gotten chewed out for missing a meal or two as a teenager.

“Sure,” Stiles said after a second. “Why not?”

Derek didn’t outright smile, but one corner of his mouth quirked up. “Follow me back to the house,” he said, squeezing Stiles’s shoulder. 

The warmth of Derek’s hand seeped through Stiles’s t-shirt, and Stiles swallowed. What on earth had he just gotten himself into?

* * * 

Derek stepped into the house first, mostly so he could get a good view of the betas’ expressions when Stiles trailed in after him, cradling a paper grocery bag in the crook of one gangly arm. He wasn’t disappointed. Erica startled, the nail polish brush slipping in her hand to paint a strip of vermillion across the back of her finger. Isaac’s wide-eyed gaze darted from Derek to Stiles, then back again. Since moving in with Scott, Isaac rarely ate with the rest of the pack. Derek could practically smell the neurons firing in his brain as he tried to make sense of Stiles’s presence. For a second, he and Stiles eyed each other warily, something unsettled in the air between them. Then Stiles smiled tightly, and Isaac ducked his head. Derek wondered if Isaac even realized he’d just submitted to a human.

Only Boyd looked unfazed. “Hey, Stiles,” he said, giving him a small nod before turning his attention back to the Nintendo DSI cradled in his large hands.

“Hey,” Stiles said, lifting his free hand in a little wave.

That broke the ice. Erica beamed at Stiles before fumbling for the bottle of polish remover at her feet, and Isaac settled back in beside Boyd, where he’d been watching the game over his shoulder. Stiles followed Derek to the kitchen, and set the bag of groceries on the counter. He was looking around him in fascination, eyes lingering on the beer fridge buzzing in the corner and the sagging marble countertops. 

Derek busied himself pulling vegetables out of the grocery bag, strangely unsettled by Stiles’s attention. Overlaying the heavy knot of guilt in Derek’s gut was a new thread of shame. Derek remembered pack meals from his childhood, the kitchen scrubbed clean and smelling of sage, light flooding through the windows as the extended family crowded around the heavy oak table. His parents had always been proud of this house, of being able to provide for their pack. Behind the heads of broccoli lined up on the counter, strips of his mom’s rose-patterned wallpaper still clung to the wall, soot gray and faded from rain and sunlight. 

Stiles completed his inspection of the room, turning back to Derek. Derek braced himself for whatever smart-ass comment the kid was preparing. But when Stiles looked back at him, his eyes were soft. 

“What?” Derek snapped. Sarcasm he could handle, but Derek hated pity. 

Stiles shrugged. “It’s not as bad as I was expecting,” he said, his heartbeat steady and even. He flicked a glance out at the window at the tree line, then shrugged, “Honestly I kind of thought you ate raw rabbits and squirrels.”

“Squirrels?” Derek repeated flatly. Giving into temptation, he stepped closer to Stiles, crowding him against the counter. Stiles’s heart rate spiked, but he held Derek’s gaze without backing down. If any of the betas had tried that, Derek would have smacked them down on principle. With Stiles, Derek just stared back, oddly fascinated by the amber flecks in Stiles’s eyes, by the pupils, slowly dilating. He set his hands on either side of the counter beside Stiles’s slender hips, bracketing him with his arms. “You think I hunt squirrels?” Derek said, leaning in until their noses were almost brushing. Derek inhaled deeply, trying to chase down Stiles’s natural scent beneath the chemical notes of Axe and deodorant.

“Well, not just squirrels,” Stiles allowed after a second, gaze finally dropping from Derek’s eyes, only to land on his lips. A new scent blossomed in the air between them, arousal cinnamon sweet and thick as honey. Blood flooded Stiles’s cheeks, the delicate veins tracing his ears and neck. The wolf inside Derek pricked to attention, and his vision went red for a second, zeroing in on the plush curve of Stiles’s bottom lip, caught nervously beneath his teeth. Derek suddenly longed to replace those teeth with his own, to nip the tender skin of Stiles’s lips and brighten them with blood, to taste it copper bright against his tongue. He was leaning in to do just that when he caught ahold of himself. In desperation, he called up the memory of Kate’s smile as she leaned over him, tracing the edges of his face. At the time, he’d thought the distant look in her eyes meant she was just as besotted as he. Now, he knew she’d been thinking of what she was planning to do to his family. A familiar surge of rage welled up inside him in response to the memory, and Derek used it to wrestle the wolf back under submission. 

“I should make you eat squirrel for that,” he said gruffly, stepping backwards, out of Stiles’s space. He tried not to read too much into the disappointment in Stiles’s eyes. Stiles was seventeen. Derek knew all too well what teenage hormones did to one’s better judgment.

“I thought you wanted to teach me what real food tasted like,” Stiles countered, his voice husky. He shuffled awkwardly, trying to surreptitiously adjust his jeans. Derek pretended not to notice.

“I do,” Derek said firmly. The muscles in his neck and shoulders were as hard as iron. Inside him, the wolf paced in its cage of anger. Once more confident of his control, Derek caught Stiles by the shoulders, careful not to let his hands linger for too long. Turning him roughly towards the living room, he gave him a little shove. “Make yourself useful. Get the others in here to help.” 

“Well,” Peter’s voice drifted in from outside. “That was interesting.”

Derek jumped, glancing out the broken window, where Peter stood in the yard, firing up the grill. He’d been so engrossed in Stiles, that he hadn’t even smelled Peter’s arrival. 

“Shut up,” Derek snapped.

Peter threw his head back and laughed. The sound reminded Derek of the old Peter, the beloved uncle who’d taken Derek and Laura to the beach, who’d sneaked them extra helpings of dessert and let them win at chess. Derek forced his fists to unclench. 

Some of the tension bled out of his shoulders when Stiles stepped back into the kitchen, the betas following in a loose cluster behind him. Derek set them to chopping vegetables and making salad dressing. It was a relief to focus on the dinner preparations, letting the sounds of their conversation wash over him. They talked about school tomorrow, and their different class loads. Stiles was taking three AP courses. Derek supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised by that — he knew the kid was smart — but he was nonetheless. They talked about the newest development in Scott and Allison’s ridiculous sham of a relationship. Derek knew, without asking, that Isaac was only eating with them tonight because Scott had abandoned him for Allison. Eventually, they started talking about lacrosse. Apparently Coach Finstock insisted meeting with the former first line at the beginning of each school year, even though try-outs wouldn’t begin until late January. Stiles and Isaac were returning to the team, and Boyd was planning to join, as well. 

“This means we’ll have four werewolves on first line!” Isaac said. “There’s no way we won’t make it to state.”

Boyd laughed. “I can’t wait,” he said. “It’ll be great to play with you guys!” He grinned at Isaac, then at Stiles, thumping them both on the shoulder. 

Stiles gave him a tight smile. “Yeah,” he said. “It will be awesome.” He glanced down at the garlic he was chopping, driving the knife down into the block with a bit more force than necessary. 

“Don’t be an idiot, Stiles,” Derek said, finally looking up from tamari glaze he was mixing for their venison steaks. Everybody turned to stare at him.

“I’m not doing anything!” Stiles protested, clutching a hand to his heart like he’d been grievously wounded.

Derek rolled his eyes. “You’ve been holding your own, all summer, against _us_ ,” he said. “Do you really think another human has a chance at beating you in try-outs?”

Stiles blinked. Slowly, a grin spread across his face. He squared his shoulder, drawing himself up to his full height “You’re right,” he said. “I’m going to kick ass this year.”

“Of course I’m right,” Derek huffed. “I’m the alpha.”

Stiles opened his mouth, no doubt to say something insulting, but Erica cut him off. 

“Maybe I should try out for lacrosse,” she said thoughtfully, tapping her freshly painted fingernails against one of the little packets of root vegetables she was wrapping in tinfoil to place in the charcoal.

The boys all stared at her.

“But you’re a girl,” Isaac said after a second.

Erica tossed her hair. “I looked it up,” she said. “Beacon Hills doesn’t have a girl’s lacrosse team. If I try out and make the team, they can’t stop me from playing with the boys.”

“Title IX,” Peter said knowledgeably. 

“But what about the locker room?” Boyd asked, a dark note in his voice. His eyes flashed amber for a second, no doubt at the thought of anyone on the lacrosse team getting to see Erica in any state of undress.

Erica licked her lips, smiling wickedly. “That’s the biggest selling point,” she said, and squealed when Boyd abandoned the salad he was tossing to lunge at her. Erica bolted, with Boyd quick on her heals. Their footsteps thundered through the living room and out the front door. 

“Teenagers,” Derek grumbled, shaking his head.

“Hey!” Stiles protested. 

Isaac was shaking his head, still looking stunned. “Can you imagine Finstock’s face if she _does_ try out?”

“I think I’d pay her to do it, just to see his expression,” Stiles agreed. The two of them started talking about their teachers, and Derek tuned them out.

When Derek had pulled the bowl of milk-soaked venison from the fridge and stepped out to the grill, Stiles followed him, leaving Isaac and Peter inside. The glow of the low flames rising off the coals illuminated the lines of Stiles’s face. Derek found his eyes lingering on the sharp chin and high cheekbones. He always thought of Stiles as round-cheeked and baby-faced, like he’d been when he first met him, standing beside Scott in the woods. It alarmed Derek to realize how much thinner Stiles had grown in the long months since Scott had been bitten. The constant danger had filed away some of his innocence, leaving Stiles sharp-edged and gaunt. Derek wondered if he were to blame for that, too.

Laying the last of the steaks on the grill, he handed the bowl of bloody milk to Stiles. “Dump this in the woods,” he said. “Away from the house.”

Stiles took it with exaggerated care, making a face. “This is disgusting!” he said. “It looks like the stuff Strawberry Qwick has nightmares about.”

Derek shrugged. “Venison tastes gamey if you’re not used to it,” he said. “The milk makes it a little milder.” 

Stiles trotted off into the woods, holding the bowl away from his body like it might explode at any second. When he returned, he stood beside Derek, awkwardly shoving his hands into his pockets.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” Stiles said quietly.

Derek tensed, thinking of the moment they’d shared in the kitchen. He busied himself turning the steaks, carefully not looking at Stiles.

“I was looking at the calendar today,” Stiles said. “Do you know the Blood Moon is only forty-five days away?”

Relief flooded through Derek, and he nodded. “I know.”

“We’re not doing enough!” Stiles exclaimed. Catching Derek’s expression, he quickly added, “I mean, you’re doing your best to help us train. But think about it. The alphas picked the date. They’re going to pick the time. Hell, they’ll probably even pick the place. They’ve got us playing defense.”

“The best defense is a good offense,” Derek said quietly.

Stiles glanced sidelong at him, surprised, then nodded. “We need to turn the tables on them.”

“Really?” Derek said in his best deadpan. “That’s all we have to do? I’ll get right on that.”

Stiles elbowed him in the side. “Whatever, Mr. Sarcasm.” 

Derek quirked an eyebrow at him. Like Stiles had any room to talk.

Laughing, Stiles ducked his head self consciously. Then frustration flickered across his face, and he sighed, shaking his head. “We need to set a trap or something,” he said. “I keep trying to come up with something, but I can’t!”

“You’ll figure it out,” Derek said. He started piling the rare steaks onto the plate, purposefully ignoring the look Stiles was sending at him. 

“Thanks,” Stiles said quietly.

Derek nodded, starting towards the house. A peal of Erica’s laughter sounded from the woods, followed by a deeper chuckle from Boyd.

Stiles caught his arm. ”No,” he said. “Derek, I mean thanks. For having me here.” He ran a hand through his short hair. “I wasn’t sure what to expect,” he said. “But this is . . . nice.”

“You’re pack,” Derek said simply, clapping a hand on Stiles’s shoulder.

Stiles smiled shyly, bumping his shoulder against Derek’s. “I’m starting to get that,” he said.

* * *

Stiles’s first class was AP calculus. Taking a seat in the back by himself, he wondered who’d been sadistic enough to schedule it first thing in the morning. He couldn’t help glancing up as Lydia strode into the room, her strawberry blonde curls flowing behind her. She looked perfect, as always, bored expression fixed in place and pink lip gloss freshly applied. Stiles gave her an awkward half-wave, wondering if she was planning to go back to ignoring him now that school was back in session. He half expected her to stride right past him and take her usual seat in the front. Even so, he was shocked when she slid into the seat beside him, tossing her hair.

“Thank God you’re here,” she muttered under her breath. “If I have to sit by one more of those fake, back-stabbing bitches, I am going to stab somebody.”

“What’s going on?” Stiles asked. As subtly as possible, he glanced around the room, taking in the cluster of popular girls who’d filed into seats in the front row. Three of them were glancing sidelong at Lydia, leaning in close to whisper to each other. Following his gaze, Lydia stiffened. Tilting her chin up, she looked each of them in the eye, smiling bright and vicious. One by one, the faces turned back to the front of the room. Stiles couldn’t help but be impressed.

Lydia pulled a pink-striped composition book from her backpack, neatly squaring it on her desk. “So I broke down a little last spring,” she said to Stiles. “It’s a perfectly legitimate reaction to stress.” A dark look crossed her face, and she sighed. “I should have told everyone I had a drug addiction. They’d probably think that was glamorous. As it is, they all just think I’m crazy.”

“Did somebody say something to you?” Stiles asked, wondering who in their right minds would be foolhardy enough to openly insult Lydia Martin.

She made a big show of lining up a black pen, a turquoise pen, a pink highlighter, and a bottle of white out beside the composition book. “No,” she said. “But they’re thinking it.” 

Stiles’s eyes widened as he took in the implication of her words. “Well I think they’re all idiots,” Stiles said loyally, and Lydia dimpled at him. For a second, her hand caught Stiles’s wrist, squeezing tight. 

“I know,” she said. “Thank you.”

“If you really want to thank me, you could always dump Jackson,” Stiles said, because his mouth always ran a few seconds faster than his brain.

Lydia smacked him with her composition book. “Don’t make me regret sitting next to you.”

“Sorry!” Stiles said, holding his hands up placatingly. “Old habits.”

Lydia shook her head. “I like you Stiles,” she said. “But nothing is ever going to happen between us. If we’re going to be friends, you have got to get that through your head.”

“I know,” Stiles sighed, feeling the finality of the words.

Lydia smiled, and patted his arm. “Besides,” she said sweetly, “where would that leave Derek?”

With a groan, Stiles buried his face in his arms, blood rushing into his cheeks and the back of his neck. “I hate you,” he muttered. “Please feel free to start ignoring me again.”

She laughed, ruffling his hair. “Not a chance,” she said, then leaned forward on the desk, all attention as the teacher began to speak.

* * *

Stiles was starting towards the parking lot when Boyd suddenly appeared in front of him, crossing his arms. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Home,” Stiles said, starting to step around him. Boyd caught him by the elbow.

“No way. There’s a lacrosse meeting, remember?”

“But I’m not first line!” Stiles said. 

Boyd rolled his eyes. “Please,” he said. “You will be. And so will I. Come on.”

They slid into Finstock’s classroom and took seats by Scott and Isaac just as he started to talk.

“Now,” said Finstock, “as per the regulations, I cannot encourage any of you to join the Beacon Hills lacrosse club. Let me repeat that. I can’t. Tell you. To whip your lazy asses into shape if you want to keep your spot in first line this spring.”

Stiles frowned, wondering how he could possibly fit lacrosse club into preparing for the alpha pack. Boyd caught the expression on his face, and nudged.

“Don’t worry,” he said low. “We get enough practice with the pack.”

“Bilinski!” Finstock barked, and Stiles started, one hand smacking against Boyd’s massive chest as he flailed. “You’re not first line.” 

“Well, about that —“ Stiles started, but Finstock cut him off.

“But you did win the game for us last year. And out of all these morons, you got the highest score in my class last year.” His face twisted, and he shook his head. “Even though I can’t tell you why. Congratulations, Bilinski. Based on your advanced knowledge of economics and male circumcision, you’re now in charge of the fall fundraiser.” 

Stiles sputtered. “What?”

“You know, the haunted house.”

Stiles shook his head. “Listen, Coach,” he said. “I’ve got a lot on my plate right now.”

Finstock stared at him. “What’s more important than lacrosse?” Last year, Greenburg brought in three grand. If you can beat that . . . Well, let’s just say I’ll be a lot more favorably inclined when try-outs come this winter.”

“I . . .” Stiles started. 

Finstock slapped him on the back. “That’s the spirit,” he said.

* * *

Stiles got home to find his dad sliding his gun onto his belt. “Really?” Stiles said. “You worked late last night.”

His dad gave him an apologetic smile. “Sorry, kid,” he said. “We’re still short-handed. You’ll have to give me another rain check.”

Stiles nodded, leaning against the counter.

“I haven’t even had a chance to look in the fridge,” his dad said. “Do you need to do a grocery run? I can give you some money.”

“That’s alright,” Stiles said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I think I’ll eat at a friend’s house.”

His dad’s face brightened noticeably. “Good,” he said. “Tell Melissa hi.”

Stiles nodded. He waited until he left before pulling out his cell phone. **Does pack still eat together?** he texted Derek.

The reply came immediately. **Be here at 6. Bring eggs.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Comments and kudos mean the world to me. As always, feel free to add me on Tumblr, Livejournal, or Dreamwidth -- I'm Piscaria on all three sites.


	9. Chapter 9

A sharp kick from Lydia’s pointy boot kept Stiles from nodding off in calculus. His jerked awake, clasping a hand to his smarting ankle and grimacing so hard that even Ms. Ramirez looked up from her stack of half-graded tests.

“Is everything okay, Mr. Stilinski?” 

Still gritting his teeth, Stiles nodded through the pain, giving her a weak thumbs up. In the next desk, Lydia twirled a strawberry blonde curl around her pencil, head leaning on her hand as she looked innocently down at her textbook. The second Mrs. Ramirez’s eyes slid back to her tests, Lydia leaned close to whisper in his ear. 

“Did you get any sleep last night? You look like shit!”

“Why am I friends with you?” Stiles asked, resisting the urge to roll up his pants leg and look at his calf. He’d bet anything it was going to bruise. 

“Because I’m amazing,” Lydia said, tossing her hair. “Now spill. I know you don’t have that much homework.” 

“It’s nothing.” At Lydia’s dubious expression, Stiles said, “No! Seriously! I was just at Derek’s too late last night.” Lydia smirked, lifting her eyebrows, and Stiles hurried on, before she could say whatever she was so obviously thinking. “Anyway, that’s not even it. When I got home, I stayed going through Greenberg’s notes from last year’s lacrosse fundraiser. Have you seen that guy’s handwriting?”

“It’s abysmal,” Lydia agreed.

Stiles sighed, scrubbing at his eyes. He looked longingly at the (now empty) can of Monster on his desk. “I’m just stressed out,” he said. “Between classes and the stupid alpha thing, the last thing I need is to deal with the lacrosse fundraiser, too.” He rubbed his leg, glancing down at his paper so Lydia couldn’t see exactly how freaked out the lacrosse fundraiser made him. 

For a few years, in middle school, Stiles’s parents had sent him to a counselor in the hopes he might learn to manage his ADHD without Adderall. “You need to learn to create structure in your environment to compensate for the lack of structure in your mind,” she’d always said. Stiles tried. His notebooks were full of to-do lists, and he had about a hundred notifications on his phone reminding him to start his assignments, to take out the garbage, to start dinner, to take his Adderall. But Stiles had never tried to plan anything more complicated than a surprise party for Scott’s eleventh birthday, and his only contribution to that had been to tell Melissa what kind of cake he wanted and let her take care of everything else. Honestly, Stiles would rather take on the alpha pack in October than watch the disaster that would inevitably ensue from his trying to coordinate the annual lacrosse haunted house. 

“Don’t worry about the fundraiser,” Lydia said, with an easy wave of her hand. “If Greenberg did it, you sure can.” Stiles’s expression must have said exactly how confident he was about that, because Lydia smiled, rolling her eyes. “Look,” she said. “If you’re that worried about it, I’ll come over after school tomorrow and help you get organized.” 

Stiles tried his best to mirror Scott’s puppy eyes. “Really?”

“Amazing,” Lydia repeated, glancing pointedly back down at her page.

Stiles couldn’t stop his grin. “I take it back. You are.”

* * *

Stiles’s good mood carried him through 5th period, when his phone vibrated with a text. His heart skipped a beat when he saw Derek’s name, and Scott turned around to look at him curiously. Blushing, Stiles waved Scott back around, unlocking his phone.

**Give E and B a ride home.**

And, just like that, some of the happiness fizzled away. Derek’s bad manners were almost magical.

 **What’s the magic word?** Stiles prompted.

 **Or else!** Derek responded at once. 

Stiles made a face, but when Boyd and Erica bounded up to him after school, he sighed, and opened the Jeep. Erica gave Stiles a lipsticky kiss on the cheek, then clambered into the backseat. Boyd took the passenger seat, and gave Stiles a nod.

"Thanks for the ride, man."

“You know,” Stiles said, as he started the ignition. "I don't actually run a taxi service. Derek's your chauffeur, not me."

"He's busy," Erica said, blowing a pink bubble about the same shade as her lipstick. 

"Doing what?" Stiles asked. Unbidden, a nervous thread worked through his stomach. It wouldn't surprise him in the least if Derek had gone off into danger alone.

Boyd shrugged. "He didn't say."

"It's Derek," Erica said. "Do you really think he stopped to explain what's happening?"

Stiles chewed on his bottom lip. "Point," he conceded.

When the Jeep pulled up to the Hale house, Derek’s Camaro was nowhere in sight. Boyd climbed out first, holding the passenger door open for Erica. Their hands tangled together automatically, and Erica glanced over her shoulder at Stiles.

"You coming in?"

Stiles hesitated. His dad wouldn't be home for a few more hours, and truthfully, his only plans for the afternoon involved his porn collection and his right hand. And while that was always a worthwhile use of his time, Stiles liked to think of himself as a social creature. 

"Depends," he said after a second. "Is Peter here?"

Boyd took a deep breath, scenting the air. "Nah," he said. "They're both gone."

Stiles shrugged, and turned off the Jeep. "Sure.” 

It felt weird to enter the Hale house without Derek around. Watery light streamed through the windows, illuminating every scuff on the darkened floorboards. Stiles stood awkwardly in the middle of the ruined foyer, glancing up at the staircase.

Boyd patted him on the shoulder. "Want to see our room?" 

Stiles followed them up the stairs and through a long corridor. A few of the doors were open. Through an open doorway, Stiles caught sight of a mattress on the floor covered by an industrial gray blanket. A stack of paperbacks stood beside it. Against the far wall stood a tall wardrobe that looked like it had probably come from a sidewalk somewhere. The doors were open, revealing a shelf piled with neatly folded dark jeans and two leather jackets hanging from the rod. Stiles took it in silently, feeling a heaviness growing in the pit of his stomach.

"That's Derek's room," Erica confirmed, leaning in beside him.

Stiles nodded. Quietly, he turned away from the doorway, waiting for Erica and Boyd to continue down the hall. He knew immediately which room was theirs. They'd covered every inch of the scorched walls with posters, and an Indian-print bedspread covered the mattress on the floor. Beneath the scattered laundry was the most hideous lime green shag carpet Stiles had ever seen. A disco ball hung from the ceiling, scattering the afternoon light seeping through the windows into the corners of the room. The air smelled like old sex and pot smoke.

"Damn," Stiles said, stepping inside. "This place looks almost habitable."

It must have been the master suite, once, because a beaded curtain led through to a half bathroom, this one papered in glossy magazine pages. A heavy dresser sat in one corner, with a chipped mirror hanging on the wall behind it. Tubes of lipstick, jewelry, and bottle of perfume covered every spare inch of the dresser, save for a six-inch space on one side, which had been cordoned off with painter's tape. A razor, men's face wash, and a bottle of Axe were lined neatly on it. Stiles glanced from it to the claw foot tub, long since disconnected from any sort of plumbing. The enamel was blackened, bubbled from heat. Erica and Boyd seemed to be using it as a laundry hamper.

"How can you guys stand living here?" Stiles asked without thinking.

Erica glared at him. “Do you remember what happened the last time we tried to leave? I still have the scars!” 

Boyd snorted, breaking the tension. "Trust me, this part of the house is a cakewalk. Do you want to see what’s really creepy?”

Erica leaned against the wall, her smile all fang and taunt. 

Stiles scuffed the floor with one sneaker. He had a feeling that he really, really didn’t. But if Stiles had one weakness, it was that he couldn’t _not_ look. Not for dead bodies, not for information about werewolves, and not for whatever was creepiest about a place that already took the running for Beacon Hill’s scariest house. “Sure,” he said. “I’m game.”

* * *

When Peter said he had something to show him, Derek suspected it was probably a trap. He went along with it anyway, though, because he was bored, and curious, and trying really hard to be nicer to Peter. So Derek steered the Camaro through the quiet, mid-day streets of Beacon Hills, following Peter’s directions through the small downtown core and into the old, industrial part of town. 

They ended up in the warehouse district, in front of a squat brick building that had once housed the town’s first printing press, or so Peter explained as Derek parked the car. It had sat abandoned for several decades, until a local developer bought it with the intention of converting it into a trio of loft apartments. The developer had gone bankrupt when the housing bubble burst, though, leaving the half-converted building abandoned once more.

“And why do I care?” Derek asked, following Peter down the side walk to the former printing press. The door opened as they approached, and Derek froze, wondering if this was the trap. But the willowy blonde who stepped out to greet them seemed entirely human.

“Which one of you is Peter?” she asked. Peter stepped forward, taking the hand she offered and kissing it instead of shaking it. She blushed, prettily, and Derek rolled his eyes. Obviously flustered, she said, “When I got your call, I thought it was kind of joke!”

“I never joke about business,” Peter assured her. “This is my nephew, Derek.”

“I’m Linda!” she said, turning a vibrant smile on Derek. She pulled a business card from her pocket with her left hand, and offering the right for him to shake. Derek ignored it. Frowning, she let her right hand drop, still awkwardly holding the business card in the air between them. Derek snatched it up, recognizing the logo of a local real estate firm. 

_Linda Hogan, broker._

“What the hell?” Derek snapped.

“Please forgive my nephew,” Peter said, laying a hand on Linda’s shoulder to ease her flummoxed expression. “He was raised by wolves. His social skills are a bit lacking.” His voice was soft, but the glare he shot Derek was all sharp edges. Derek glared right back. Linda cleared her throat nervously.

“Would you like to see the building?”

“No,” Derek said.

Peter wrapped an arm around Derek’s shoulders, and gave Linda a wide smile. “We’d be delighted.”

Frowning, Derek followed them through the heavy steel door into the building itself. It wasn’t much to look at, all concrete floors, exposed pipes, and brick walls. The unit Linda led them into had been almost finished when the housing bubble burst. It was brighter than Derek would have expected from the outside, a breeze drifting in from the rock-sized hole in one of the floor to ceiling windows. A guest bedroom, a bathroom, and a couple of closets were tucked against the back wall, but otherwise the space was dominated by a huge, open living area, punctuated by support columns. A spiral staircase led up to an equally open sleeping area upstairs. Derek started up them, pointedly ignoring Linda’s spiel about open concepts. 

The wrought iron banister was cold beneath Derek’s hand, nothing like the proud oak stairs that dominated the entryway in his family home. Derek couldn’t decide if that made it better or worse. The stairs creaked beneath his feet, and Derek focused on the sound. Beneath him, Peter said something in a low voice that Derek was deliberately not trying to hear. Linda giggled, and Derek’s hand tightened around the banister. 

His aunt Amy had never giggled. Her laugh had bubbled up from her belly, strong and deep. She’d taught Derek to play poker at seven, taught him to waltz at thirteen. She’d taught him how to hold his two baby cousins, how to change their diapers, how to soothe away the werewolf’s tiny claws, and how to be extra gentle with the human. Uncle Peter had been devoted to her. He’d brought her flowers on rainy days, and twirled her back and forth around the foyer, while Derek and Laura laughed and clapped. The autopsy report showed she’d smothered the two children herself before the flames could reach them. 

Upstairs, light flowed through the spacious windows, as different from the darkened Hale house or the cavernous train station as Derek could imagine. He strode up to the glass, polished away a circle of thick dust with his sleeve. From here, he could see the library roof, the parking lot of the Methodist church, the brick wall of the apartment complex next door. Far in the distance, the green line of the forest. 

“Of course, the upstairs is really only suitable for one person, or a couple,” the realtor was saying. “But there’s an extra bedroom downstairs, and you could portion off this area easily enough to make a third bedroom.” 

Peter said something low, and she giggled again. Derek closed his eyes, leaned back against the exposed brick wall. To distract himself, he pulled his phone out of his pocket, shooting a quick text to Stiles telling him to pick Erica and Boyd up. There was no telling how long Peter’s flirting was going to take. The phone buzzed in Derek’s hand, and his lips curved upwards at Stiles’s predictable reply. He texted back, distracted, thinking back to the story Stiles had told at dinner last night, something about Scott and a roller coaster. Derek had tuned out most of the story itself, too focused on Stiles’s slender hands sketching elaborate figures in the air, at his wrists peaking out from the frayed cuffs of his corduroy jacket. Derek should buy him a leather one, he thought. It was the closest he could come to marking Stiles as pack without giving him the bite or dragging him to a tattoo parlor. Without draping his own jacket over Stiles’s shoulders, mingling their scents together.

“The price is unbeatable,” Linda was saying. “We’ve been trying to unload this for a long time.”

Derek pushed himself away from the wall. “No,” he snapped. His voice echoed in the open space of the loft.

Linda stared up at him, shocked, as though she’d forgotten he was there. Peter rolled his eyes. Derek glared back at him, leaning over the wrought-iron railing. He wanted to vault over the side, but Linda was human. He settled for walking down the stairs with as much dignity as he could manage. 

“Derek,” Peter said, “be reasonable. I specifically asked Linda here for the most downtrodden, depressing space she could find, just so you would feel more at home. Does this not suit the bill?”

“We have a house,” Derek said.

Peter’s lips narrowed into a thin line. “We have a tomb,” he corrected. “And I, for one, am tired of living in it.”

Linda was glancing between the two of them, confused. Derek stalked past her, letting the building’s door slam shut behind him as he stormed out to the Camaro. 

Behind him, he could hear Peter saying, “Give me your card. I’ll see if I can talk some sense into my nephew.”

* * *

The heavy door leading down to the basement squeaked ominously when Boyd shoved it open, revealing the pitch blackness below. Boyd started confidently down into the darkness, and Stiles tamped down a sense of foreboding. Instead, he pulled out his phone, planning to pull up his flashlight app.

Erica's hand closed around his wrist. "You don't need it," she said. “Just wait a second.”

It was so dark that Stiles couldn’t see Boyd moving, but he could hear the quiet drag of his sneakers, just the flash of his teeth as he grimaced at something. A second later, a blinding light flashed on. Stiles blinked furiously, bringing a hand up to shield his eyes. Erica released her hold on the basement door, and it slammed shut behind them. Stiles whirled around, instinctual panic making him reach for the doorlatch. It opened easily beneath his fingers, but a second later, he took in the surface of the door itself, and was stumbling backwards, wanting to puke. He missed a step, and would have tumbled down the stairs if Erica hadn't caught him.

"Holy shit!" Stiles gasped, clinging to Erica with one hand, and the cement wall with the other.

This side of the door was gouged with clawmarks, too many sets for Stiles to count. He remembered, with horror, the police report he'd seen on the kitchen table. All of the bodies had been found in the basement. Eight years ago, Derek's family had crowded against this door, trying to fight their way to safety. Stiles shuddered, and Erica nodded sympathetically. "Creepy, right?"

Stiles nodded, shakily. “Why is there light here?” he asked. “I didn’t think this house had electricity.”

"There's an independent generator down here," Boyd said. "I think the hunters brought in." When they had Derek trapped, Stiles realized. He wondered if Boyd and Erica knew about that part.

Descending the steps in a daze, he crossed to the far wall, where a set of manacles hung from the ceiling. An abandoned wire lay on the floor beneath them, leading to a machine in the corner. Stiles stepped around it cautiously as he would a snake, trying to imagine what Derek must have looked like, strung up here, getting tortured by Kate. Stiles lifted onto his tiptoes to touch one of the shackles, shuddering at the dried blood that flaked off onto his fingers. Derek’s blood.

"How can Derek stand living here?" he asked, not really expecting either of them to answer.

Erica chewed on her lip. “Even Peter wants to leave,” she said quietly. “He and Derek have been arguing about since July.”

Boyd nodded. "Derek refuses to move."

Stiles sighed, thinking of the clothes and books in the room upstairs, of Derek, stubbornly taking up residence in the burnt-out shell where his family had been murdered, where he himself had been held prisoner and tortured. How much could one person hate himself, Stiles wondered, letting the manacle clatter back against the concrete wall.

Boyd suddenly stiffened, glancing up. A second later, Erica followed suite.

"What is it?" Stiles asked.

Then he, too, heard it. The front door was opening. Footsteps were echoing upstairs. A second later, the basement door slammed open, Derek's slim figure silhouetted in the doorway.

"What are you three doing down here?" 

"Sorry," Boyd said, starting up the stairs. He looked abashed, and Stiles swallowed, glancing at the floor. Somehow, this felt a bigger violation than looking into Derek's room had.

"It's my fault," he offered. "They were showing me around.”

Derek didn't say a word, but his mouth tightened into a thin line. He stepped backwards, holding the door open while Boyd, then Erica, scuttled through it. Derek gave them both death glares, and they ducked their heads, inching cautiously away from him.

Stiles followed at a slower pace. No sooner had he stepped past Derek, than the steel door was slamming shut. Derek caught him by the shoulders, slamming him against it. 

"Don't ever go down there again without my permission!" he yelled. his face mere inches from Stiles.

Normally, Stiles would meet his eyes, argue with him, but he still felt shaken from the basement. Instead he lowered his gaze. "I won't," he said. "I'm sorry." 

Derek shook him, hard. "Jesus Christ, Stiles! Do you have any idea how dangerous it is down there?"

"Yeah," Stiles said, swallowing thickly. "I think I do." he reached up, resting one hand against Derek's shoulder.Derek was still glaring, but his grip on Stiles was softening, bruise shifting from painful, to almost tender.

Derek sighed, closing his eyes. “Everything down there is death and destruction," he said, voice quiet.

Stiles didn’t know what to say. The leather of Derek’s jacket was cool, buttery soft beneath Stiles’s hand as he slid his palm upwards, until he reached the back of Derek’s neck. Stiles curled his hand around the hot skin there, squeezing tight. A shudder ran through Derek’s body, and he melted forward, pressing their foreheads together. His hands flattened out against Stiles’s chest, heat radiating even through Stiles’s layers. If Stiles tilted his head just a little bit, they’d be kissing. Stiles drew in a ragged breath at the thought, and the air tasted like Derek smelled, all sunshine, and cedar, and smoky musk. He wanted to kiss Derek, to wrap his arms around him, and never, ever let him go. Stiles dragged his fingers through the short, thick hair at the nape of Derek’s neck, suddenly dizzy with possibility.

 _He likes you, too_ Lydia had said.

His heartbeat was so loud that even Stiles could hear it. God, Derek had to know what he was thinking, had to smell it on him. But he wasn’t moving away. His broad hands were dragging up Stiles’s chest, over the flannel, smoothing over his shoulders and curling around his biceps to draw Stiles even closer. Stiles’s free hand lifted cautiously to rest on Derek’s hip. _Man up, Stilinski,_ he told himself. _Seize the day._

Stiles leaned forward, and the breath caught audibly in Derek’s throat. For a second, wild panic flashed in his eyes, before his lashes drifted down, obscuring them. He leaned in to meet Stiles, lips parting slightly . . . And then the front door crashed open, and Peter stepped inside, arms laden with bags full of groceries. He glanced from Stiles to Derek, and smirked. 

“Am I interrupting something?” 

Stiles had never wanted to kill Peter more than he did in that moment.

“No,” Derek muttered, stepping away from Stiles. He shoved his hands into his pockets, rolling his neck from side to side. Stiles could practically see the walls going back up around him. When Derek turned back o him, his face was perfectly composed, no sign of the fear and vulnerability he'd shown a moment before.

“Are you staying for dinner?” Derek asked, voice neutral, distant. Stiles wanted to say yes. But . . . 

“I can’t,” Stiles said regretfully. “Dad’s home, for once He’s making meatloaf.” 

Derek shrugged, as if the answer didn’t concern him. But Stiles saw the momentary flicker of sadness in his eyes, and it warmed him from within.

“He’s not home until six, though,” Stiles said, bumping Derek’s shoulder. “You’re stuck with me until then, dude.”

“Oh joy,” Derek deadpanned, rolling his eyes. But he wrapped an arm around Stiles’s shoulders, steering him back to the living room. And if he maybe lingered a little bit too long . . . Well, Stiles didn’t complain.


End file.
